


Baptize Me In

by hollo



Category: South Park
Genre: Gen, M/M, Repressed Memories, Road Trip, implied post traumatic stress disorder, life - Freeform, memory distortion, relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 48,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollo/pseuds/hollo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a simplicity in the chaos, a method to the madness. There is something beautiful behind these walls of dirt.<br/>-sequel to Pink- -StanxRedGoth-</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spit it Out

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to put author's notes here but it's been so long since I've started posting this on ff.net that most of them aren't viable anymore.  
> So I'm posting the chapters without Author's Notes, until the last one.  
> I hope you enjoy.

_But we can never come back here again_

_We can only hope_

_To forget_

* * *

_The sky was heavy with clouds, gray bottomed and stretching from horizon to horizon. The wind crooned in his ears, a low sad sound. It echoed around the hollow in his chest, and he gripped at his shirt with one shaking hand. His stomach was in his throat, and he could taste bile on his tongue. His eyes followed a lone bird in flight, a line of dark gray floating on buoyant winds._

_The vastness surrounding him terrified him; the emptiness threatened to overcome him, tip him off balance and off the world. The world surrounded him, but there was nothing in it, reflected above and below. He swallowed thickly, his senses whirling, his eyes unfocused._

_The leaden sky shuddered over his head._

_He dropped._

 

* * *

 

            I buried my face deeper into the pillow. Whoever had thought of the sun coming up at seven in the morning was an asshole, and if I ever met them I’d be sure to tell them in a very angry and threatening manner. It was a Wednesday, sure, but the bed was much too warm to leave, and I had taken the day off of work, after all. I really couldn’t think of any reason why I needed to be out of bed this damn early. I had just managed to start drifting off into the dream world when a shrill screech made me jump; groaning I reached out an arm and slapped at the alarm clock until it shut up. Seven thirty. Still too early.

            With another groan I turned over, arms reaching out towards the warmth of the body sharing the bed with me. Or, as the empty air between my hands indicated, the body that had been sharing the bed with me but no longer was. I cracked open an eye to see nothing but rumpled forest green sheets in front of me. I patted the spot next to me; still warm, but just barely. Grumbling, I sat up finally and rubbed at my face. The sun was way too bright, even through the blinds.

            With a yawn I dragged myself out of bed, stumbling over my feet as I headed towards the bedroom door. In the attempt to not walk into the corner of the dresser I managed to walk into the side of the door as I opened it instead.

            “Goddammit,” I muttered, rubbing my side. So, I lacked a little coordination in the morning. Raking my fingers through my hair, I made my way to the kitchen area of the apartment, the scent of fried eggs and coffee growing stronger at each step.

            “Why the hell are you a morning person?” I groaned, grabbing a chair and scooting it over next to Red where he sat the small table. I dropped into it, leaned over to put my chin on his shoulder and scowled at him. “You suck so much.”

            Red’s reply was a raised eyebrow and a cool look. He picked up his black mug, the one with “Amish Boy” painted across it in my crappy handwriting, and held it up to my lips. I growled, bypassing the mug and pressing my face against his neck and closing my eyes. He smelled good. He always smelled good. Something like a mix of exotic spices and honey. With a sigh I wrapped my arms around his waist and pulled myself closer.

            “I don’t want coffee…” I muttered, my lips moving across his skin. I felt him shiver, and I grinned.

            “You’re starting early today…” Red set the mug down on the table and turned his head towards me. I pulled back a little so I could look into his hot, hot eyes. He grinned slightly, and I leaned forward, pressed my forehead against his and closed my eyes as I pressed my lips against his –

            Fingers.

            I opened my eyes to find him looking at me with an amused little grin.

            “What?” I asked, my lips still pressed against his fingers because, after all, I had no aversion towards any part of his body.

            “Milk,” Red said, folding his fingers down so only one remained, which he used to tap me on the chin. “And eggs.”

            “What?” I asked, a little more puzzled than the first time.

            “A chicken, but not too big.” He put the lone finger to my lips to keep me from repeating the question, and his eyes floated somewhere up and to the right. “And… some lemons, and green beans – fresh, not frozen. And some apples.”

            I stared at him, but he gave me a hard look and frowned, just a bit.

            “You said you were going to go to the store four days ago…”

            “But… I, I forgot…”

            “We are not going to be living off of McDonald’s and Instant Ramen for the rest of the week, or however long it takes you to remember…” Red said firmly, his hand dropping to the table. I sputtered for a bit, pulled my arms away from his waist and leaned back a little.

            “You… You… You are such a girl sometimes,” I glared at him, poking at his shoulder. It wasn’t exactly the most imaginative insult ever; I wasn’t exactly at my most creative at eight in the morning.

            Red’s head tilted, just a bit, his eyes narrowed, and his face got that certain look to it, that one, certain look. My skin went cold all of a sudden, a good kind of cold. A tingle ran down my spine, and my breath tried to speed up without my permission.

            “We’ll see about that after you get back from the store…” His voice was low; an alluring smile spread across his face. I placed my hand over his, pressed down hard on it as I stood up, grinning at him.

            “Oh, we will…”

 

****

 

            Half an hour later I found myself wandering around the Jewel-Osco at the edge of North Park, shopping basket in hand. There were seven different types of milk in the dairy case, and I wasn’t sure which one I should take. Vitamin D, Calcium Enriched, Skim… I sighed, ran my fingers through my still damp hair, and glared hard at the white gallons. Closing my eyes, I waved my hand around in front of me, and stepped forward. Grabbing the first gallon I touched, I stepped back and opened my eyes again. Skim. I grimaced, put the jug back in its place and grabbed a gallon of reduced-fat.

            Fine, there was the milk. Next were the eggs, the brown ones with no artificial whatevers in them. I played eenie-meenie-minie-mo with three plastic containers and ended up with the free-range organic in hand. Pricey, but worth it. I placed the eggs in the basket next to the milk and headed on down the aisle, humming along with the music playing over the speakers. The faster I got done with the shopping, the faster – and I grinned at the thought – I got to get home. Just one problem; I couldn’t remember just what the rest of the list was. I stopped at the head of the aisle and stared down at the gallon of milk and case of eggs, trying hard to remember just what I was supposed to get. Something… something round, maybe? Oranges? No, Red hated oranges. Peaches? Apricots… no, ap… apples? Apples, apples just might have been on the list. I started down the aisle again.

            “Stan?”

            I froze, still staring at the pasta sauce/pizza dough/fruit snacks display in front of me. I could have pretended I didn’t hear her, but that might not have worked, considering her voice sounded pretty close behind me. I could have just not turned around, although that might just have, probably, made me look like an ass or something. I put on the best smile I could muster and turned around slowly.

            “Hi, Mom,” I managed a little wave with the hand not currently holding a shopping basket.

            My mom’s eyes brightened just a little. She was smiling, and it was genuine, but uncertain at the same time. She had her own basket on her arm, a loaf of toast and green beans – green beans! – and a few cans of something I couldn’t quite make out.

            “It’s been a while,” Mom fidgeted a little with her basket, her fingers tightening and loosening around the plastic of the handle.

            “Yeah,” I answered. I could feel my smile slipping a little; there was a bad taste in my mouth. For a moment I stood there looking towards her but not at her. I could feel her eyes on my face; I was sure she was looking me over good and well. I’d dressed in all of five minutes, and with my wrinkled second-day tee shirt and the jeans that hadn’t seen a washer in over a month, I was sure I looked like a sorry case. Dammit.

            “How… how are you doing?” Mom asked finally, her voice fluttering a little. I shrugged, cleared my throat.

            “Good, you know. Pretty good.” I said, shifting my weight to my other foot. “It’s good.”

            “That… That’s good.” Mom nodded, her smile growing wider without growing brighter.

            An awkward silence followed, filled the air with heaviness. The store seemed even emptier than it had earlier; it seemed like we were the only two customers, standing there four feet away from each other, at the edges of a much larger chasm.

            “Well…” I began, switched the shopping basket to my other hand. Mom started, as if she’d been lost in thought, and her smile faltered a little.

            “Right, well, I’ll… I’ll see you around, then?” Her voice rose a pitch higher towards the end. I nodded.

            “Sure, yeah.” I managed more of a heartfelt grin, and she gave me a wave and turned away. I stared ahead at the shelf full of mayonnaise as I heard her steps echoing down the aisle. My head was pleasantly full of static.

            The sudden vibration in my pants’ pocket brought me back down to earth. I pulled my phone out and glanced at the caller ID as I pressed the talk button.

            “Hey KB,” I grinned, turning and heading down the aisle.

            “D-Do you know i-it’s been exactly two y-years since you th-threw yourself to t-t-the wolves?” Kyle asked, all seriousness. I laughed.

            “As a matter of fact, I do,” I smirked, slowing down by the meats. If I remembered correctly I was supposed to get something from there.

            “I h-have a p-present for you two,” Kyle continued. I heard rock music playing in the background.

            “Do you, now?” Chicken, that’s what I needed.

            “I do,” Kyle answered.

            “And it is what?” I held the cell phone to my ear with one shoulder and started digging through the chickens.

            “I will n-not let myself int-to your apartment with my s-spare keys and d-d-dump ice water over y-your heads as you’re f-f-fucking each other’s brains o-out in the living r-room with the b-blinds c-closed,” Kyle sounded pleased with himself. I fumbled a roaster and nearly dropped the cell phone as I started laughing.

            “Are, heh, are you going to tell Red that too?” I asked, fixing my hold on the cell phone and trying not to break out laughing again.

            “Already did,” Kyle said, “T-told me I’m w-welcome with the i-ice w-w-water after everything’s over and d-done.”

            I did drop the phone that time, breaking into laughter and leaning on the meat cooler to keep myself standing. I ignored the shocked look of the old lady a few feet away and attempted to get myself breathing properly again. Leaning over, I picked up the phone and put it back to my ear, still chuckling.

            “Chicken,” Kyle said, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

            “What?” I frowned, staring at the naked, refrigerated poultry in front of me.

            “Chicken,” Kyle repeated, and then continued, “L-lemons, apples, g-g-green beans.”

            “And eggs and milk,” I finished for him.

            “F-f-figured you’d remember th-those,” He chuckled. I heard a door open and the rock music grow louder. “God d-damn, roomie n-needs to find his f-f-fucking hearing aid. S-seriously. And w-what do you need a ch-chicken for anyway?”

            “Red wanted it,” I said, digging into the chickens again. The ones on top looked all bruised and… handled.

            “Can’t do anything k-kinky with a ch-chicken,” Kyle said matter-of-factly, “Not unless y-you want s-s-almonella or something…”

            “Sick dude,” I grimaced, pulling a medium sized chicken out from under the pile. It looked decent enough. “Red’s been watching the food network again.”

            “Sucks t-to be you t-then,” Kyle snorted. I rolled my eyes.

            “Shut up,” I tossed the chicken in the basket and moved further along in the store. “What else was I supposed to get?”

            “Fuck, y-you’re hopeless, aren’t you?” Kyle sighed. I heard plastic crinkling in the background. The rock music was fading again, and a door closed. “Lemons. A-apples. Green b-beans.”

            “Lemons, apples, green beans,” I repeated it to myself a few times.

            “G-guess Red’s right, c-c-concussions _are_ b-bad for memory,” Kyle laughed.

            “Yeah, keep laughing, you never know when I’ll conveniently forget that my fist is not supposed to meet your face,” I growled. An empty threat, I knew it, he knew it. Kyle continued laughing. I sighed, and walked towards the produce department. Lemons, apples, green beans… and then, home.

 

****

 

            There’s something very intoxicating about leather, the smell and the feel of it. It has something musky going on, something deep and rugged in it. It assaults the senses and makes a total mess of everything. It gives just the right way over muscles and joints, curves perfectly around wrists and ankles and necks. It’s amazing.

            The straps were tight around my wrists. The edges threatened to cut into my skin with each movement. My fists dug into the small of my back beneath me. I flexed my arms, felt the burn of tension in the muscles all the way up to my shoulders. The room was dark, but dozens of flickering candles threw shadows on the walls and the ceiling. The room felt hot. The leather collar around my neck was heavy against my neck, reassuring. I shifted my head, felt it slide just half an inch across my skin, its edges rough, uneven.

            Through half-lidded eyes I looked across my body to where Red sat between my bare, spread legs, black knee-high buckled boots on him and nothing else because god damn I loved watching his body move with the candlelight accentuating his every line down to the dip of his hipbone and the curve of his kneecap. He held the end of the leather leash attached to my collar in his left hand, and slowly, slowly, he started twisting it around his hand, the tension growing until I could feel the collar pulling at the back of my neck. I gurgled something that was half-way between a whimper and a moan and Red smiled, sultry and enticing. I shifted my body; I could feel him, his heat, between my knees, but the cuffs on my ankles and the rod between them wouldn’t let me close them on him.

            His right hand touched my knee, fingers spider-light against my skin. Fire shot from each spot he touched, each place he trailed his fingertips along. His hand moved, painfully slow, down the length of my thigh. I was breathing hard, watching as his fingers reached the base of my hardened cock and  - fuck – and wrapped around it, and his hand was moving over it, and his thumb was rubbing against that one spot right beneath the head and I was doing my goddamn best to keep from moving except that I did, just a shudder. His fingers tightened around my shaft in response, tight and hard, too hard, and it _felt so good_. I closed my eyes and bit my lip to keep from moaning and to keep from moving, bucking my hips.

            His hand left my cock suddenly, and I let out a small whimper. I could feel him shift on the bed, could feel the leash go slack, and opened my eyes to see he had moved over me, knees to either side of my hips. He stretched out over me, pressed against me. I could feel his chest move against me with each of his breaths, could feel his cock, hard and wet, against my abs. His face was above mine, his eyes burning, and when he dropped his lips to mine I opened my mouth eagerly, tongue reaching to meet his own.

            Stars exploded somewhere inside me, a blaze erupted, and I pressed my body against his as best I could, felt his fingers tightening in my hair. I breathed him in, tasted him, shuddered, drank him in. He was familiar and dangerous and hot and I felt safe. I always felt safe.

            Our lips parted; I hadn’t realized I was forgetting to breathe. His eyes met mine, and he smiled, genuine and real and wholly true, and my heart hurt; it was too small, it couldn’t hold it all.

            He leaned forward again, pressed his forehead against mine, and I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of his breath on my lips. His voice was soft; it spoke to my soul.

            “Happy anniversary, Love…”


	2. Heaven Forbid

Routine was, well, routine. Wake up at seven, fall back asleep, drag self out of bed at seven-thirty. Out the door by eight, at work by eight thirty. The day would either drag on or rush by, depending on how many packages were going through and how cranky the customers were. It wasn’t the best job available, but I had the option of dropping to part-time when my college courses started up so I stuck with it. It wasn’t so bad; Rob, the manager, was cool enough, and while my coworkers weren’t exactly stellar, they were pretty normal people.

            Four o’clock on the dot I waved to Suzanne and headed out the door. The wind outside was cool, but the sun was warm and the sky was significantly less cloudy than normal. The UPS Store was just one of a few shops on the block, grouped together into a small mini-mall of sorts with a parking lot out front. I headed down the sidewalk alongside the storefronts and across the crowded parking lot to reach the main street. I waited for a couple of cars to pass, and then jogged across the street, my messenger bag swinging at my side. Someone had left their dog, a little poodle, tied to a streetlamp, and it barked at me as I walked by. I whistled to it, smiling, but the dog kept barking, starting to dance on its hind paws when the leash kept it from following me.

            At the end of the street I took a left and headed down the sidewalk in the shade of the large trees growing in the grass between sidewalk and street. The houses here were older two- and three-flats, most of them looking to be in decent condition. Almost all the houses had the lower basement level windows fitted with bars, and some even had them on the first floor as well. The house I aimed for didn’t have bars anywhere on it, although that might have been because the basement level windows were all boarded up, and the first floor windows were all blocked with what looked like newspaper. I sat down on the concrete steps in front and pulled out my cell phone.

 

txt: 4:15pm

kb where r u?

 

reply: 4:17pm

5 minutes

 

txt: 4:20pm

ur gonna be late

 

reply: 4:22pm

FU

 

txt: 4:25

hurry up

 

“God f-f-fucking dammit, S-stan!”

I looked over my shoulder in time to see Kyle slam the front door closed. He ran his fingers through his hair and glared at me as he hurried down the steps.

“Five minutes,” I said, standing up as he reached the bottom.

“F-fuck off, I’ll m-make it,” Kyle growled, buttoning the last buttons on his dark gray dress shirt. Together we started down the street, Kyle hurrying along.

“Are you working Saturday?” I asked as we took the corner.

“Don’t t-think so,” Kyle replied, pulling back a sleeve to check his watch. “Shit.”

“Your boss is cool, it’ll be fine,” I said, giving him an encouraging grin. A harshly determined look came to his face, and I sighed.

Reaching our next turn, we crossed the street and headed on down the sidewalk. There were a few storefronts along the way, some little mini-marts, a video rental store. Kyle was keeping up a fast pace; he’d stuffed his hands into his pockets, probably to keep from glancing at his watch every few seconds. I thought it’d be best not to bother him at the moment, and tried to keep pace while dodging other pedestrians who couldn’t be bothered to watch where they were walking.

With a hurried look around, we jogged across an intersection on a red light, leaving a car honking behind us as we reached the curb. Ahead I could see two figures standing by one of the storefronts. Red I recognized easily, but the other… I squinted to try to make out any features.

“Who’s t-that?” Kyle asked. I shrugged.

“Dunno.”  
            I caught Red’s eye as we moved closer; he looked a little harried, and I guessed that the cigarette he’d crushed out on the sill of the tattoo parlor window wasn’t his first. The guy standing next to him seemed to notice us at the same moment, stopping, apparently, in mid-sentence. He was around my height, black hair with the edges in back dyed a radioactive green. Over all, he had a sort of goth thing going on, but with a lot more metal than I was used to seeing; the stupid bracers he had on were more studs and rivets then they were leather. For some strange reason, I got the feeling I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Red peeled away from the building as soon as he noticed us slowing down, leaving without even a look at what I guessed was either an unwelcome visitor or an extremely overly-attached customer. Two steps, and he was pulling another cigarette out of his pocket, lighter flame flickering as he lit up. I lay an arm across his shoulders companionably, and he let out a smoke-filled sigh.

“Long day?” I asked.

“I need to buy a new pack,” Red answered, voice monotonous. Not good, then. I hoped he had managed to eat something between smokes; the last time he chain-smoked on an empty stomach I nearly got my hand bitten off trying to wake him up for work the next day.

“Didn’t w-we go to s-school with t-that guy?” Kyle spoke up suddenly, glancing over at us. I felt Red tense, but suddenly something…

“Holy shit Mike Makowski,” I exclaimed, chuckling. I remembered him now; he spent the first two years of high school trying out for every single sport we had.

“Yeah, t-that’s him,” Kyle grinned. “Wasn’t he all i-i-into vampires or someth-thing like that?”

Red groaned, and I gave him a puzzled look. He did not look happy.

“What?” I asked, puzzled. He gave me a look that screamed “Imminent-bodily-harm” and I smiled, a bit nervously.

“ _Poser_ ,” Red spat; he was practically chewing on his cigarette. “Asinine weekend goth.”

“H-h-holy shit,” Kyle chuckled; he looked horribly amused. I was tempted to remind him that he was running late.

“Three hours, and he can’t pick a design,” Red continued, muttering angrily, “All the time talking. Talking. For three. Straight. Hours.”

 “Why didn’t you guys just kick him out?” I ventured, hoping I wouldn’t be starting off a shitstorm. Red gritted his teeth, and I just might have paled. I hadn’t seen him this pissed in a long time.

“Because the other customers thought he was _entertaining_ ,” Red’s voice dropped to a near whisper with the weight of his contempt; I could feel him shudder under my arm, although I couldn’t tell if it was from disgust or just plain anger.

“A-as interesting as t-this is getting,” Kyle broke in suddenly, and I realized that he had stopped just ahead of us. He nodded at the doorway to the left, _IMPULSE_ stamped out in the sheet metal decorating the wall of the building above it. “I need t-to get going.”

“All right dude, see you later,” I gave him a half-wave as he headed on in.

Red and I headed on down the street; we could have headed straight home, but I thought a change of plans would be in order. Red might have looked entirely cool and collected on the outside, but I could tell he was still seething away. It wasn’t that difficult to tell; the slight twitch in the way he tapped the ash from the end of his cigarette, the way his eyes weren’t really focused on anything. Damn, but he hated talkers. I don’t know how he managed to live with me.

“Let’s stop by _Hollo_ ,” I said, grinning. Red tossed his cigarette butt towards a garbage can a store had sitting out front, and reached down to his pocket automatically. He seemed to remember the lack of smokes at the last moment, and grimaced.

“All right,” He sighed, but his eyes were warm when he looked at me. I dropped my arm from his shoulders and took his hand in mine, fingers twining.

“I think I’m going to get a… mocha latte with caramel syrup, whipped cream, and those chocolate sprinkles and cinnamon powder on top,” I said seriously.

“… with a chocolate straw…” Red added.

“Yes, with a chocolate straw,” I grinned, squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back, and looked at me, the barest trace of a smile on his lips.

We reached our destination a little while later, a secluded shop front that looked more like the front of a mini cottage, its walls dark wood around windows veiled in spider-web curtains and heavy burgundy drapes. A large white raven was painted on a sign hanging over the door, the word Hollo spelled out in silver letters at the base. I followed Red inside, assaulted instantly by the scents of coffee, chocolate, and incense. I’d used to feel horribly out of place there; you were either a starving artist in some degree or in love with the dark and hiding in the shadows, and I wasn’t exactly sure I fit in. But then, that was the grand scheme of _Hollo_ ; you didn’t have to fit in. The décor was eclectic; it had the spider web curtains, and a large cubist painting hanging above a real fireplace that was filled with wild flowers and some sort of wild grasses at the moment. A giant cage standing in front of a large bay window at the side of the main room held the café’s mascot; a one-winged white raven, rescued after accidentally flying into power lines, who knows how long ago. It gave a throaty caw as we walked by, following us with one pale blue eye.

The girl behind the counter smiled brightly as we walked up. Carly; 19, recently enrolled as a biology student at the local college. Nice girl, friendly and open, and she was absolutely wicked at drink making. I ordered my monstrosity of chocolate, sugar, and caffeine, chocolate straw included, and Red got the café’s signature White-Out; three shots espresso, steamed milk, heaped on top with home-made whipped cream and candy cane shavings. Two insane coffees that had the potential to hold more sugar than either of us had all week long. We were exactly like kids in a candy store.

After waiting for Carly to work her magic, we headed over to a small table set up underneath a large watercolor of an industrial factory and took our seats. There were a few small booklets sitting at the center of the table, and I picked one up and started browsing through it.

“Oh, hey, it’s Terese’s new poems…” I said, pausing in reading to take a bite of the chocolate straw.

“Anything catch your eye?” Red asked distractedly; he was attempting to eat the whipped cream off of the top of his coffee using only two coffee stirrers.

“Let’s see… Here we go,” I cleared my throat and read aloud:

_And flicker, like the west dove’s wing_

_against sky so sodden and full,_

_Dear friend,_

_and dance the rabbit’s dance_

_in grove and field abroad, amongst clover,_

_and stare doe-eyed at the light of the morning,_

_awash in the birth of a new dawn,_

_and stand an unshaken beast_

_at the eastern front of an age new and foreboding_

_and mysterious,_

_and breath.”_

****

 

I dropped my keys onto the coffee table and dropped onto the couch. Red sat down next to me, slouching low and leaning against my shoulder. He looked totally wiped out; I shifted my position to get just a little bit more comfortable, and started looking through the mail. Credit card offer, second credit card offer, To Current Residents, more junk mail, sales for the second half of the week, an ad for a new pizza place, and a curious looking envelope that made me scowl, just a tiny bit. I pulled it out and tossed the rest of the mail onto the coffee table.

The envelope was a pale beige color, like dirty old paper. It had a stamp with what looked like a war plane on it, and our address was written in a familiar, cramped and impatient handwriting. No return address, of course. With a sigh I ripped the envelope open and pulled out a cheerful looking postcard featuring a cartoony man in lederhosen holding up an overflowing beer stein, the words “Guten Tag!” painted above him. I turned the postcard over to reveal more of the familiar handwriting.

_Have you called your parents lately, Stanley?_

_PS: Technische Universitat Munchen is fucking awesome._

There was no signature, but I didn’t need one. I didn’t know what I should be feeling more deeply: anger at his barbed comment, or pity over the fact that what should have been gloating looked more like a friendly update.

“Do you want to keep it?” Red asked, sitting up next to me. I thought on it for a moment, then shrugged.

“Have fun,” I grinned, handing him the postcard. He already had his lighter out, and was flicking it on as I stretched my arm out across the back of the couch. He held the postcard up to the orange flame, watching intently as it curled the edges and raced along the glossy paper, browning it and turning it to ash piece by piece. I was a bit jealous, to be honest. He’d only ever known the sadistic side of the fat bastard; I wished I could have been able to hate him like Red did, purely, and without all those stupid years of almost-but-not-quite-but-maybe-a-little friendship getting in the way.

The flames reached the end of the postcard, flaring dangerously close to Red’s fingertips. I tensed, just a little, but he blew the lingering flames out at the last moment, crumbling the remains of the postcard between his fingers and letting it fall to the floor. He tucked his lighter back into his pocket and leaned against the couch back again.

“Maybe we should eat something,” I muttered, leaning my head against Red’s.

“Maybe,” He replied, but I could feel him push close against me, his arm laying across my stomach. “Maybe in a little bit.”

I smiled, dropping my arm to curve against his back, and closed my eyes.


	3. Half-Truism

_Sayang, sayang sayang sayang, sayang sayang sayang?_

            “Darling, I love you, dear, do you love me?”

            _~In the Malay language_

* * *

 

_The floor beneath him shuddered, rocked. A high wind roared and squealed across the roof above. He curled further in on himself, face pressed against the sleeves of his damp shirt. He tasted salt; everything tasted of salt. He stared hard at the wall across him, at the close-fit planks that formed it. Moisture had gathered at the seams, gleaming spheres of wetness bordered by powdery white._

_The wind roared above again; a crashing, splintering sound reached him, a sound that had nothing to do with the walls around or the wind above but with all the nature around him._

_He heard the murmur of voices around him; others with him, trapped like rats in the small room. He pulled his knees tighter into his chest, wrapped his arms around them and stared up above him at the bottom of the roof. It was metal, solid. There was moisture around the rivets and white powder along the seams. A thousand points of water danced a staccato upon its outer side. He swallowed thickly, eyes following the seam right above him towards the farther edge. The wind howled again, harsh and loud and speaking in inhuman tongues._

_His was a harsh mistress._

 

* * *

 

            I closed the door on my Civic and pocketed the keys, walking across the sidewalk to the front of the tattoo parlor. The front window had a large tattoo-styled snake wrapped around a skull. _Serpentine Ink and Body Enhancement_. I pushed open the door and walked in, greeted by cool air just slightly hazy with the smell of white sage. A girl sat in a chair near the door, flipping through a binder and chewing thoughtfully on a lip ring. There was more metal on her face than there was lost between the couch cushions back home. She looked up at me with blue eyes that looked way too young for her face, and I gave her a friendly grin. She gave me a slightly nervous smile back, then looked down at the binder, flipping pages again.

            I saw the counter was empty, and headed past it and through the doorway that led towards the partitioned back room where all the magic happened. I could hear the buzz of the tattoo machine coming from the back of the room as I walked in. The first partition’s curtain was pulled aside, and I looked in to find Oliver sitting at a small table, gloves on his hands, needle bars and tubes and cleaning solution arrayed on the table in front of him. He looked up as I walked over and sat down on a chair across the table from him. He had cat eyes, greenish-yellow and x-ray powered. I grinned at him, and he gave me a slow grin back, blowing a stray few curls out of his eyes as he turned back to the tubes in front of him.

            “Red’s finishing up,” Oliver said, slipping one of the tubes into a plastic pouch.

            “Cool,” I said, and pulled out one of the binders sitting on a shelf below the table as Oliver started on the next tube. Flipping through the pages, I looked to see if there were any new additions to the pictures inside. It was a mixed book, but I didn’t have any trouble picking out Red’s work from among Henrietta’s; he had a certain way of outlining his designs that stood out, and while Henrietta used a lot more color in her work, Red had an insane ability with his gradients and shading.

            I heard the front door open, and a few moments later someone stepped through the doorway and headed past the partition. I looked up to see Henrietta, dressed in her usual blackness – corseted top with fishnets, black skirt, and shiny black knee high boots. She was digging through her coffin-shaped purse as she walked by.

            “Hello Oliver,” She said in an almost-interested tone. He replied with a noncommittal grunt, and I put the binder back in its place on the shelf.

            “Hi Henrietta,” I said, and grinned at her. She stopped digging through her purse and lifted her head to give me a long, cold glare. Without a word she walked on past. I raised an eyebrow and looked over at Oliver. He hadn’t looked up from his work but he was grinning.

            There was some noise in back, then Henrietta came walking back to the front. A man followed her, heavily tattooed even past the borders of his t-shirt. His hair was electric blue and styled up in huge liberty spikes. He nodded to Oliver as he followed Henrietta up to the front desk. I heard Red moving around in back, and then his footsteps sounded closer.

            “Ollie, I – Oh, Stan,” Red stopped at the opening of the partition, pausing in pulling one latex glove off. I grinned at him, and his eyes grew warm.

            “I’ll take care of the machine,” Oliver said, closing a plastic pouch and putting it aside.

            “It’ll only take a few minutes,” Red said, pulling the glove off the rest of the way with a loud snap. He was almost frowning, but that was him. He hated leaving things unfinished. Oliver just waved a hand dismissively and started placing the bags into the shop’s sterilizer. Red just kept giving Oliver that same almost-frown, and pulled his other glove off with just as loud a snap as the first. I would have laughed, except that probably wasn’t the best thing to do in that situation.

            “Hey, what the boss-man says, goes, right?” I said, keeping my grin to a minimum. Red snorted and turned to stalk away. I heard the door to the shop’s bathroom swing, and a few minutes later Red was back. He still looked a little miffed, but I could change that.

            “Later,” I said to Oliver as I stood up, and he nodded a goodbye. 

            “Bye Ollie,” Red waited for me to walk up to him, and I gave him a quick kiss before taking his hand and starting to walk out to the front. He didn’t look so miffed anymore, and his fingers twined with mine as we headed out. The front was still mostly empty, and the girl from before was still sitting in her seat, only now Henrietta was sitting next to her. They had the binder opened up between them and were discussing colors and line thicknesses. Henrietta looked up only long enough to give Red a good-bye look, then turned back to the binder.

            Red sighed as soon as we were out the door, and I gave him a look.

            “What?” I asked, opening up the car doors and slipping into the driver’s seat. Red got in himself, rolling down the window as soon as he did.

            “She doesn’t have to ignore you,” Red pulled out a cigarette and lit it up, blowing the smoke out the open window. I chuckled and started the car.

            “At least she’s not trying to poison me anymore,” I said, pulling out onto the street. Red gave me a look, and I grinned widely. “What?”

            He rolled his eyes and turned back to the window. I reached over to turn the radio on. Some cheery pop song started playing, and I grimaced. Red pulled the glove box open and pulled out a CD to put on.

            “How was work?” I asked. Red skipped past a few songs, then leaned back into his seat.

            “It was fine,” He said, tapping his cigarette on the edge of the window. “People actually knew what they wanted to-“

            He was interrupted by the beginning strains of One Winged Angel. He scowled, pulling his phone out of his pocket. I frowned; a scowl was not a good thing.

            “Who is it?” I asked, pulling into a turn lane and stopping at the red light. He took an angry puff on his cigarette before replying.

            “I don’t know,” He looked at the display for a long moment, during which the phone stopped ringing, then shoved the phone back in his pocket, still looking pissed. “I’ve been getting calls from this number lately, but I don’t know who it is.”

            “A wrong number, maybe?” I looked over at him, and he shrugged. Red didn’t give his number out to just anyone, actually, he didn’t give his number out at all. The only people on his phone list were Oliver, Henrietta, his mom, and me.

            The drive was silent for while, the only sound the music playing from the speakers. I pulled up in front of Kyle’s house. Of course, there was no parking anywhere, so I drove up as close as possible to the parked cars. Almost as soon as I stopped the back door was pulled open.

            “Kyle eez running a leetle late…”

            “No problem,” I turned around and flashed a grin. The French accent really didn’t match that low voice. “You didn’t forget it this time, did you?”

            “Non, but I would prefer to stuff eet into ze toilet instead of my ear,” Christophe growled, glowering. As usual, he looked scruffy and unkempt, like he’d just been hiking in the backwoods and not vegetating at home. He gave me a dark-eyed look. “Why are you so ‘appy?”

            “Yes, why are you so happy?” Red gave me a curious look. I looked from one of them to the other.

            “What? We’re going bowling!” They were still giving me odd looks. “Bowling, I mean… You guys aren’t excited about bowling?”

            The car’s backdoor opened, and Kyle slid into the seat opposite Christophe.

            “I, f-for one, am excited about b-b-bowling,” Kyle raised his hand and looked around.

            “It’s bowling,” Red said, raising an eyebrow. Christophe snorted, and leaned back in the seat. I pulled the car back onto the street.

            “Yeah, and you wanted to go, and now you’re saying you’re not excited?” I looked at Red, slightly disappointed. He gave me a-just-barely-there amused look.

            “Yes, I’m looking forward to an enjoyable evening, but that does not mean I’m bouncing in my seat with barely contained anticipation.” Red said, flicking his bangs onto his face. That was just a sign that he was hiding a grin. I resisted a grin myself and feigned hurt.

            “Oui, what ze goth said,” Christophe agreed.

            “I am not bouncing in my seat,” I said, a bit defensively. Christophe snorted and Red just looked out the window.

            The bowling alley wasn’t far off, and after a short while I was putting the car into park and everyone as piling out onto the blacktop. We headed on inside and got our lane and shoes. We were conveniently located just in front of one of the ball racks, and while I pulled my shoes on Kyle and Christophe attacked the rack.

            “I w-want a ten p-p-pounder,” Kyle said, rolling the balls in their spots to check their numbers.

            “Non, _mon ami_ , you cannot ‘andle ze ten pounder, ‘ere, ‘ave zis one,” Christophe held out a six pound ball. Kyle gave him a nasty look.

            “Y-y-you know w-what you c-c-can do with t-t-that b-ball? You c-c-can shove it u-u-up y-“

            “I’ll take it,” Red interrupted, taking the ball. Both Christophe and Kyle gave him an odd look, but he just walked over and set it down on the chair next to him front of our lane’s computer screen. Not getting an explanation from him, Christophe and Kyle turned their looks on me.

            “Uh… it’s black?” I shrugged. I honestly didn’t know myself. I stood up and walked over to the ball racks, picking out a blue and gold ten pounder. Christophe picked out a dark red fourteen-pounder, and Kyle settled on a green and black swirled eight pounder.

            “Oh, c-c-can I p-put in our n-names?” Kyle asked, setting his ball on the ball return. Red picked up his ball onto his lap and slid over to the second seat behind the computer, and Kyle sat down in the first.

            “I want to go first,” Christophe said, walking up and resting his ball on the edge of the ball return. I walked up after him. ‘The Shoveler’ appeared in the first square on the computer screen above.

            “Wait, wait, that’s not fair,” I said, pointing at Kyle and Red. They both gave me blank looks. ‘Superjock’ appeared in the second square.

            “Don’t give me those looks, you know what I’m talking about,” I said, glaring at them. Red continued to look nonplussed, and Kyle just started typing away at the computer again, a grin tugging at his lips. ‘Jewsheep’ and ‘Byron’ filled in the last two squares.

            “All right then, I’ll just sit over here,” I said, moving to the seats opposite of our lane. Christophe glowered at all of us and hoisted his bowling ball up on one shoulder.

            “Eet was one time! And look, Kyle’s nose eez perfectly fine!” He turned on his heel and stalked over to the front of the lane.

            “I-i-if you don’t m-mind, I’m g-g-oing to d-duck, just t-t-this once,” Kyle chuckled, sliding down in his seat.

            “ _Casse-toi_!” Christophe threw the bowling ball at the lane, and it shot down in a wide curve, toppling two pins before bouncing into the gutter. He clenched his fists. “ _Merde_!”

            Kyle cracked up laughing, and Red turned to give me an amused look. I raised an eyebrow and grinned. Let the games begin!

 

****

 

            Fifteen strikes, ten spares, and three hours later, I pulled up in front of Kyle and Christophe’s house. Christophe had spent the entire ride cursing in French, and Kyle and I had spent the entire ride trying not to laugh. Red had spent the entire ride pretending not to admire the two green clover ribbons he’d gotten for his two four-strikes-in-a-row streaks.

            “So, are you going to tell zem?” Christophe said suddenly. The mood in the car suddenly shifted towards the colder pole. I frowned, then turned to look at the back seat curiously. Christophe was giving Kyle a very pointed look, and Kyle was staring very hard at a spot on the car ceiling.

            “Tell us what?” I asked. Red had turned to look at the back seat too, and I caught his eye, sharing a curious look. Kyle continued to stay silent, and I saw his hand stray towards the door handle.

            “ _Non_ , no runneeng. You said you weel tell zem,” Christophe said, crossing his arms. He was a pretty intimidating guy, and he was just oozing it right now. Kyle pulled his hand back from the door handle and shot him a treacherous look.

            “I s-said I’d t-t-tell them later,” Kyle hissed. Christophe didn’t look convinced.

            “ _Oui_ , later, when you are ‘alfway to zees Oregon,” Christophe matched Kyle’s gaze, and they glared at each other for a long moment.

            “Okay, Oregon?” I said, looking at Kyle now. He was trying really hard not to look back at me. “What about Oregon?”

            “N-n-nothing about Oregon,” Kyle growled, and glared at Christophe again, “Nothing a-about Oregon, I d-d-don’t even know i-i-if the info’s r-r-right.”

            “What info? Kyle, what are you talking about…” I was pretty much ready to get into that back seat and shake the answer out of him. I didn’t like the way he was starting to look around, like a rabbit caught with its back against the wall. Christophe took a deep breath, and with one last look at Kyle, turned to me.

            “Kyle thinks ‘e ‘as found Kenny,” Christophe said in a low voice.

            There was long silence, and then the car door was opened and Kyle was gone. I looked after him, and then I was pulling at my seatbelt, but Christophe put a hand on my shoulder.

            “Eet eez fine, he will calm down,” Christophe said, patting my shoulder. “ _Alors_ , at least ‘e will ‘ave to talk to you about eet now.”

            With one last look Christophe slid across the seat to the open door and got out, closing it behind him. I turned to face the front of the car and stared out the windshield. Kenny. Kyle thought he found Kenny. A hand touched my shoulder, and I looked to find Red eyeing my curiously.

            “Stan, let’s get home,” He said softly. I nodded and put the car into drive. The evening-darkened streets passed by quickly. I parked beneath the one and only working lamppost on our block, and we got out and headed up to our apartment. I felt tired all of a sudden, and not in a good way. I was thinking of keychains and letters and my stomach was starting to churn.

            Wordlessly, Red took my hand and pulled me over to the couch. He sat down at one end, and I dropped onto my back across the length of it and put my head in his lap. I stared up at the ceiling for a while, trying to get my stomach to settle down and let me think in peace. Red ran his fingers through my hair gently. It was soothing, and maybe I could just forget about thinking about things and just relax.

            “There’s a million McCormicks out there,” I said, obviously failing at relaxing and not thinking. I tended to talk with my hands when agitated, which wasn’t always a good thing, and I was starting to wave them around now. “Okay, not a million, but there’s tons.”

            “Mmmhmm…” Red rested one hand against my head with his fingers still in my hair, and put the other on my side. I looked up at him, and he frowned slightly. “Do you think Kyle would have gone to look for him?”  
            “Maybe? I don’t know… Red, you remember what he was like after Kenny left…” I groaned and covered my face with my hands. “Everything just went to hell. Kenny was gone, Kyle was a mess, and Cartman... The bastard jumped at the opportunity to take everyone’s lives and tear them apart, and then he had the gall to apologize and say he just didn’t know what he’d been doing.”

            I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to focus on breathing normally. I looked up at Red, not too surprised to see his eyes had gone ten degrees cooler than they had been. Cartman and his stupid agendas were what had us living half-way across town from our families in the first place. I reached up a hand and touched Red’s cheek, brushing my fingers gently along his jawbone.

            “Kyle is going to go. There was something unfinished there, something that didn’t give him any rest.” I sighed, looking back up at the ceiling. “Still, I can’t believe he never stopped looking. I gave up after a few months…”

            “They must have had a strong bond,” Red said, looking down at me, the ice gone from his eyes.

            “Yeah…” I’d always wondered about them, about what happened those last few weeks. They’d always seemed to have a tough-love sort of friendship, but there was something else, something that ended up tearing them apart. I wish I knew what it was.

            I looked at Red, and he met my gaze, and we didn’t need to speak to agree.

            “Can you get a week off?” Red asked as I sat up.

            “Shouldn’t be a problem, but what about you?” I asked, turning around to face him. He gave me a slight grin.

            “It’s Ollie,” He said, and I laughed. Of course. I reached out and pulled him close, hugging him as tightly as I could.

            “Stan? I can’t really breathe,” Red gasped, but he didn’t try to squirm away. He wrapped his arms around me instead, so while I let up a little, I didn’t let go of him entirely.

For a moment we stayed like that, wrapped up in each other, but he was too warm and I just liked having him close way too much to let that sort of opportunity pass me by. I pressed my face against his hair, breathing in the scent of incense and spices and chocolate. Turning my head I kissed his temple, his cheek, placed quick kisses along his jaw line and down along his neck. Red hadn’t worn his collar, and I took full advantage of the fact, licking down along the line of his neck while my hands slid up the back of his shirt and across his warm skin. With a feral sort of growl he pushed me down onto the couch and straddled my hips, pressing his lips to mine hungrily. I grinned inwardly, opening my mouth and meeting his tongue with mine. I slid my hands up his back, pulling his shirt up as I did, and Red had already unbuckled my belt and was working on the button and zipper of my jeans. I pulled out of the kiss for a moment, and he finished with my zipper and reached around to pull his shirt up over his head. I watched him, ran my fingers across his pale skin, over his chest and down his stomach. He tossed his shirt aside and reached down to start pulling mine up.

“Red?” I started, and he paused at his work on my shirt and looked at me. “You’ll stay with me?”

I didn’t know what I was asking. No, I just didn’t know why I was asking what I was asking. I just got a little worried, sometimes. Well, not really, not actually worried, it was just a fleeting thing, just here and gone. I didn’t know why it hit me, I didn’t know why it should bother me, even a bit.

For a long moment Red just looked at me with the softest gaze I had ever seen him have. Then, he smiled, and I felt my heart skip and I couldn’t be sure when it started up again. Red rarely smiled, Red almost never smiled, but when he did, he smiled for me. He smiled for me. I’d do anything for him, I’d give up anything at all, for him, god, I loved him so much.

            He took my face in his hands gently, and leaned forward to press a kiss against my forehead. My heart sped up again as I looked into his dark, smoldering eyes. He was still smiling.

            “Stan, I’ll stay with you forever,” He said softly. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close, and he snaked his arms around my neck and back and pressed a gentle kiss to my lips. “Forever, remember that.”


	4. A Streetkid Named Desire

“So, when were you planning on going?” I asked, looking up at the ceiling of Kyle’s bedroom. I was lying on my back on the floor, the only spot in the room that wasn’t totally covered in some kind of junk. Well, not junk, but still. Kyle stepped over me and put some folders down on his desk.

            “I d-d-dunno,” He said. He turned around, put his hands on his hips, and gave the room a critical once-over. Yeah, I didn’t know what he was thinking, all I knew was that for some weird reason it looked like his desk, closet, and dresser had decided to party while he was out, and didn’t clean up after themselves.

            “You do know, you just don’t want to tell me,” I said, grinning, and sat up. He gave me a glare, and walked over to his bed to move stuff around. Yeah, I knew I was right. I stared at his back for a while and fiddled with a loose thread on my jeans. Damn things were starting to fall apart. “We’ll go with you.”

            Kyle paused in picking something up, and half turned to look at me, eyebrow raised.

            “Me and Red, we’ll go with you,” I said, shifting to sit cross legged, and smiled at him as brightly as I could. Gotta play this right.

            “Y-you don’t t-t-think I can d-do it myself,” Kyle said, turning back to the things on his bed. He shoved a pile of shirts to the side with much more force than necessary. A few things fell off the side of the bed. I winced slightly.

            “No, I think you’re more than capable of doing it yourself.” I said, and Kyle snorted in reply. I rolled my eyes. “You know, Kenny was my friend too.”

            Kyle paused again, but didn’t turn around. I waited for an answer, but none seemed to be coming, so I stood up and started to walk over to the bed.

            “Tuesday,” Kyle said suddenly, and turned to give me a hard-eyed look. I stopped walking.

            “This Tuesday?” I asked, a little surprised. Kyle kept giving me that same look. I thought about it real quick; Red wouldn’t have a problem getting days off with Ollie, and me… If I shifted some schedules with the others, I could probably get the time off. ”We can do Tuesday.”

            “You’re s-serious?” Kyle asked, and I nodded. He kept looking at me suspiciously for a long moment, then suddenly his demeanor changed, and he turned and headed towards the desk with an impatient sort of energy all around him. “O-okay, look.”

            I walked over as he started up his laptop from sleep mode. He jumped on mapquest and brought up a route stretching from Denver to an address in a place called Coos Bay, Oregon.

            “Twenty-two hours of driving?” I traced the bright purple line with my eyes. Driving through Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and then through all of Oregon. Geeze, that was a freaking long route.

            “I-it’s all the w-w-way out almost on the c-coast,” Kyle said, zooming in on the area. Coos Bay sat right at the edge of an inlet, and it looked like it was really close to the ocean. “I-it’s only a f-few minutes from t-t-the shore.”

            “Tell me this,” I said, and Kyle turned towards me. “How were you going to get there without a license?”

            “B-b-by driving under t-the speed limit?” Kyle grinned. I gave him a stern look, and he laughed.

            “Right, that would work,” I said, and shook my head.

            “It c-could,” Kyle smirked. I sighed, then looked back at the map.

            “If we leave on Tuesday…” I started counting the days off. What, ten, eleven hours of driving per day…?

            “W-we get there Wednesday n-night,” Kyle said, walking over to his bed and shoving some things aside. He sat down and leaned back against the wall. “A-and have all of T-t-Thursday f-free.”

            “That’s not a lot of time.” I turned to him, quirking an eyebrow. He shrugged and crossed his arms.

            “I-it’s enough,” Kyle said decidedly, and I mulled it over.

            “We’d be getting back late on Saturday probably,” I said, and he shrugged again.

            “M-meet up’s on S-s-Sunday.” He said. I shook my head slowly and sat down on the desk chair.

            “You got it all figured out, don’t you?” I grinned, and he grinned back slyly. For a moment we sat like that, only the rumbling bass from Christophe’s sound system breaking the silence. “So, do you think that… you know…”

            I rubbed my hands together and avoided looking at him.

            “M-m-maybe.” Kyle said softly. He looked over at something on the bed, his eyes darkening. “It’s t-t-the biggest lead I-I got.”

            I was tempted to ask him just where he was getting his leads from, then I remembered who his roommate was. Right. I spun the chair around a little and looked up at the posters on his wall. Bad Religion. Sex Pistols. Screeching Weasel.

            “Why am I not surprised we’re going to be driving across the country?” I asked suddenly, and looked back at Kyle. He gave me an odd look.

            “B-because we’ll a-a-actually be d-doing s-something?” He offered. I thought about it, and it seemed to fit. Acting instead of sitting around and waiting. Doing something instead of wondering if and why and why not.

            “I guess…” I stopped spinning the chair and looked over at him. “You know, I’m sort of…”

            “Excited?” Kyle asked, quirking an eyebrow. I laughed.

            “Yeah. It’s like, massive road trip, into the unknown,” I grinned, and he grinned back.

            “Just l-;ike old t-times, right?” Kyle laughed.

            “Yeah, except fat ass isn’t here to whine all the way over, and we won’t be ending up stranded in Peru,” I chuckled.

            “O-oh man, P-P-Peru!” Kyle groaned. “N-never touching p-p-panpipes again. E-ever.”

            I laughed, shaking my head. We had one messed up childhood.

            “You know, I’d been thinking about getting a guinea pig.” I said, spinning the chair a little and looking out the window. Kyle snorted, standing up from the bed.

            “W-what, and m-make it w-w-wear a t-rex s-suit?” He said wryly, but I didn’t turn around. The sky outside was starting to darken to a deep navy blue. It was almost the right shade…

            “I’m gonna name it Stripe.” I said softly. There were some clouds moving across the sky, palest white, their bottoms painted a vivid red-orange of the setting sun.

            “Stan?”

            Kyle sounded a little worried, and I frowned, just for a second. Then I put on a grin and spun back to face him. He was looking at me curiously, arms full of clothes that had recently been on his bed.

            “So, Tuesday, right?” I was horrible at changing the subject, it’s true. I wouldn’t deny it.

            “W-what’s wrong?” Kyle asked, and he was getting that look in his eyes that said he was going to drag it out of me if he had to. I hoped he wouldn’t.

            “Nothing,” I said, maybe too quickly. I didn’t even know what was wrong, not really. Well, maybe I did. Maybe I just didn’t like thinking about it – maybe that was the problem.

            “Y-you wanna t-t-talk about it?” Kyle was being a good friend. I knew that. The problem was, when it came to that subject, I didn’t want a good friend. I wanted a friend that would turn a blind eye to it, a deaf ear, that wouldn’t try to make me actually bring it out into the open and talk about it.

            “Not really.” I said honestly. Kyle didn’t look happy – he’d probably been waiting for an opening like this for what, a year? More? I almost felt bad that I was stealing it away from him, but it was my own damn fault. I needed to pay more attention to the things I was saying before I said them.

            “N-not with m-me, y-you mean,” Kyle said, and I started to object but he sighed loudly and walked over to his open closet. He tossed the clothes he was holding inside and looked at them for a moment. He turned back to me and gave me a long even look. “Maybe y-you should t-t-talk to Red.”

            I shook my head automatically. Kyle looked like he’d been expecting that, and he started to say something again, but I stood up and held my hands up.

            “No, Kyle, not yet. Not now. I can’t even remember it right,” I said, not looking at him and trying not to look anywhere, really.

            “B-because you d-don’t want to,” He said, and I dropped my arms to my sides and turned to look at him.

            “I just… just need more time, or something,” I didn’t honestly know myself. All I knew was that things were coming back, things I didn’t want to focus on, or think on, or see again. Not again.

            “It’s b-been f-f-four years, Stan!” Kyle was exasperated. I balked for a moment, tried to think of something to say.

            “I’m.. I’m sorry, it just came out. I didn’t mean it to, just… it’s… sometimes, it just,” I shook my head, started walking towards the door. “I gotta go. I’ll tell Red about Tuesday, and I’ll give you a call later tonight.”

            “Stan!”

            I was almost at the door when he grabbed me by the arm. For a moment I wanted to pull free, throw the door open, run down the hallway and out and all the way back home. My head was pounding. Instead I turned to look at him.

            “E-everything’s gonna be a-a-allright,” Kyle said, softly and seriously. I stared at him for a long moment. I hadn’t realized I’d started breathing this hard. My head was pounding and I felt overheated, nauseated. Still, something about the way Kyle spoke was soothing, calming. I managed a half-grin, and nodded my head.

            “Yeah, yeah… you’re right,” I said, and Kyle grinned too, “You better get your shit together man, your room looks like a freaking tornado blew through it.”

            Kyle snorted, dropping his hand from my arm. He wasn’t entirely won over by my acting but he knew better than to push it.

            “O-only reason your p-place is clean is ‘c-c-cause Red’s g-got you w-w-whipped,” Kyle smirked, following up with whip sound and action.

            “Hey, that’s only true on special occasions,” I joked. Well… said in a joking manner, let’s say. Kyle gave a sharp laugh.

            “Oh m-man, not t-t-the imagery I n-needed,” He feigned disgust. I gave him a good-natured shove.

            “Ha ha. Seriously, I gotta get going.” I said, and Kyle nodded. I opened the door, bracing myself for the blast of heavy music that greeted me. Christophe was insane. With a final nod to Kyle, I pulled the door closed and headed home.

 

****

 

            Three guys, one Civic, and enough food to get us at least part of the way to Oregon. Sounded like a sitcom. Sounded like a plan too. Hopefully it would be a workable one. Seven AM on a Tuesday morning off of work was usually the time I turned over onto my other side and started on my second round of snoozing. A cup of Red-strength coffee still wasn’t enough to wake me up to the point where I’d be able to drive without crashing and killing us all, so I found myself hunkered down in the passenger side seat as we drove out of Denver and started out on the long trip. Kyle was crashed on the back seat, apparently just as much of an early bird as I was.

            “You two are just slightly pathetic,” Mr. Early-to-Rise said from the driver’s seat, glancing at me. I gave him a sleepy glare and yawned.

            “Come on, it’s seven in the morning,” I said, stretching my arms back over the head rest. Kyle mumbled something in the back seat, but I couldn’t make it out. “It’s too early for anything but auto-pilot.”

            A slight flicker of a smile crossed Red’s lips, and he turned back to face the road ahead of us. I stared blearily out the windshield; asphalt as far as the eye can see. The sky was pretty damn cloudy, and it better not rain while we were driving. I hated driving in the rain.

            “Cows,” Kyle said suddenly from the back seat. I frowned, and twisted around to find him sitting up in the middle of the seat.

            “What?” I asked. Maybe he was sleep… whatever-ing.

            “I w-wanna see c-c-cows.” He said, seriously.

            “If I see any cows, I’ll tell you,” I told him. He nodded, also quite seriously. It was pretty damn apparent neither one of us was very awake.

            “How were you planning on driving out there if you can barely see straight this early?” Red asked. Kyle shrugged.

            “Red Bull,” He said. I made a gagging sound, and he started laughing. Red rolled his eyes and flicked his bangs out of his face.

            “That stuff is horrible,” I said, fiddling with the glove compartment. I gasped suddenly, and slapped the radio on. “Music!”

            “F-fuck yes, w-what song is t-t-this?” Kyle called out, sounding way too excited. I threw my hands up, smacking them against the car ceiling.

            “All American Rejects!” I said enthusiastically.

            “Fucking h-hot,” Kyle responded. I grinned at Red, who seemed way too focused on the road ahead.

            “Come on Red, rock out! It’s cool, it’s just us. No one has to know,” I smirked.

            “Absolutely right,” Red said smoothly, “It would be near impossible for anyone to find your bodies out in the middle of nowhere.”

            I blinked, my understanding of his words a little slowed by the foggy way-too-earliness of the moment. Kyle shifted in the back and leaned forward between the front seats.

            “H-he’s joking, r-right?” He asked, giving Red a wary look. I grinned and chuckled.

            “Yeah, he’s joking,” I said, and looked at Red, who was looking as nonchalant as ever. “Right?”

            Silence.

            I looked back at Kyle, then turned around and opened up the glove compartment. I dug through the CDs there and pulled one out.

            “Oh, hey, Bad Religion. You know, I really feel like listening to some Bad Religion,”  I said, shoving the CD into the radio.

            “Awesome, d-dude. B-bad Religion is r-r-rockin’,” Kyle nodded enthusiastically.

            I looked over at Red and found him looking amused, his lips curved in the slightest grin. I snorted. Bastard. I blasted the volume, and leaned back in my chair. The drive was on.


	5. Peaches

Five hours later we’d snacked through half the food we’d brought along and had switched CDs six times. It was lunch time, and while we weren’t exactly starving, a stop would be a good idea. The problem was the road we’d driven onto to get to the truck stop marked on the map was leading us further and further into the flat plains of Wyoming, and with no buildings in sight.

            “Wyoming is f-fucking boring,” Kyle muttered, staring out the back window. “T-there’s no c-c-cows.”

            “There were cows in Colorado,” I said, staring out my own window. Grass, grass. A tree.

            “What’s that?” Red said suddenly, and I looked ahead to see something dark and tall and vaguely building like on the side of the road ahead of us.

            “W-whatever it is, s-stop. I need t-to piss,” Kyle said, leaning up between the seats.

            I suddenly became very, painfully, aware of the pressure in my own bladder. I really, really needed to take a piss. Bad.

            “That sounds like an awesome idea,” I said as Red started to pull over by the structure.

            “W-went through half a twelve p-p-pack of Coke,” Kyle said. I shoved the empty mini chip bags off of my knees and Red turned the car off.

            “How the hell did we manage that?” I shoved the door open, and Kyle and Red exited at their own sides.

            “Part of it is on the car floor,” Red reminded me, walking over to side of the car me and Kyle were on to look at the building.

            “S-sorry about t-t-that,” Kyle said, and glanced back inside the car with a slight grimace. “T-threw a shirt on it t-t-to soak it u-up.”

            “It’s cool.” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “Rock the Casbah is an awesome song.”

            “Hot,” Kyle responded. I nodded sagely.

            “Super hot.” I answered. Red leaned back against the car side and gave us a curious look. I grinned at him, and he rolled his eyes. We stood there for a moment, the brick and mortar of an old abandoned building in front of us and the sun shining down from overheard. At least it wasn’t overcast anymore, the clouds having been blown away, or maybe we left them behind.

            “I c-call far back,” Kyle said suddenly.

            “Right side,”  I called out.

            “Car.” Red said.

            I turned to him with a surprised look, and he snickered slightly before pushing off and heading towards the far left side of the building. Kyle dashed away right after, and I headed over to the right side of the structure. Ruins. Leftover building? There were large bushes growing there, and some scraggly trees, and I squeezed in between the bushes and the standing wall. We were out in the great wide open, but it was just so freaking wide open. Even with the bushes between me and the rest of the world, I still felt like I was being watched. I wasn’t a paranoid pisser, seriously, but I didn’t like being all exposed in… okay, so it wasn’t in public, but still. It just felt weird.

            Bladder finally emptied, I squeezed back out from behind the bushes and started wandering around the side of the building. There was an opening a little further down, maybe a doorway of some sort, and I headed over to it. Some stones were arranged as steps leading towards the opening, and I walked up them and inside the building. The roof only existed in rough patches, and sunlight shined down in large splotches on the old and rickety wooden floor. The building was one long rectangle, and there were a few wooden benches arranged on the floor, and scraps of others on the ground where they’d fallen apart. I turned around to the farther part of the building, and found myself looking at a raised area of floor, on which stood a large wooden table. Or, wait, I stepped closer and looked at the wall behind the wooden table. There were remnants of paint on it, and far up near the top of the wall where it reached the ceiling, there was the faintest trace of gold paint in the sign of a cross.

            “Oh fuck, this is a church,” I said out loud, and heard footsteps on the wooden floor. I turned around to see both Red and Kyle walking in through the main entrance, widened by the lack of stones at one edge.

            “Y-you shouldn’t s-s-swear inside a church,” Kyle admonished, waving a finger at me. Suddenly he gasped and pointed at me, then at Red. “Y-you shouldn’t even b-be in here!”

            “What?” I asked, and Red looked at him curiously. Kyle put his hands on his hips and gave us both a long look.

            “Gaaaay,” He said, “G-gays aren’t allowed on h-h-hallowed ground.”

            “Says the atheistic Jew,” Red retorted.

            “H-he can’t t-touch me because I d-d-don’t believe, so I’m s-safe,” Kyle crossed his arms and grinned smugly.

            “Your logic is infallible,” Red quipped. Kyle snorted. I shook my head and laughed.

            “So, what do we do now?” I asked, looking around at the walls. The place was pretty old and worn down. It didn’t look like there was too much more to it than the stone walls.

            “Oh!” Kyle said suddenly, dropping his arms. “T-there was this s-shed thing I w-w-wanted to check out. L-looked like there was s-something inside. I’ll be b-back.”

            He turned around and headed back outside hurriedly, and I looked after him curiously. A shed thing? I wondered what could be inside, if anything was. Maybe robbers hid stuff in there, thinking no one would find it, or maybe some really bored kids hid their stash of cigarettes and booze out there. Red walked over to where I was standing and looked up at the wall behind the table – or was it an altar? It didn’t look like one, but this was a church.

            “”What about you?” I asked him.

            “Oh, I think I have an idea,” He said, and turned to look at me with that special sort of glint in his eye.

            “Are you thinking about-“ I was interrupted by shove that pushed me up against the table edge, and then Red’s lips were on mine and his arms were around me and his body was pushing up against me. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him even closer, returning the kiss and feeling like I was getting set on fire. Maybe I was, this was a church after all, but I couldn’t find it in me to care too much.

            “So, you are thinking about it,” I said, breaking away after a long moment. Red’s eyes were smoldering, and his hands were under my shirt, fingers tracing lightly along my skin.

            “Yes, yes I am,” Red said, voice low and lusty. I rolled my hips against his, and he pushed back, thighs sliding against mine. He pressed against me, lips crushing against mine hungrily, hips rolling and rocking, fuck, he was practically riding my leg. Somebody was obviously horny as hell today.

            “What about Kyle?” I asked in a break between kisses. Red was working on my belt and I was pulling his shirt up, fingers trailing across his pale skin.

            “He won’t come looking for us,” Red murmured, hands pulling my belt free of the buckle and staring to work on my pants. His lips trailed along my jawbone, tongue flicking out to tickle across my skin. I slipped one hand past the edge of his pants. He wasn’t wearing boxers and I wasn’t surprised.

            “Could get messy,” I said, slipping my hands around to work on the front of his pants. Stupid button-fly pants.

            “I’ve got condoms,” Red had my pants undone and he was sliding both them and my boxers down off my hips. He wasn’t doing a good job of it, probably because he was getting distracted by my hands on his crotch. Fuck, I was getting distracted by my hands on his crotch, but mostly because he couldn’t keep damn still.

            “If you want your pants off you’re going to have to stop humping my hands,” I muttered into his ear, fighting with the buttons at his fly. He let out a breathy groan, pressing into my hands again…

 

****

 

            It was my turn in the driver’s seat, and we were heading onward down 80 west. The scenery was much the same as it had been, although we’d driven past a few towns and smaller cities. An hour further down the road was the motel we were going to be stopping in at for the night, at which point we’d have driven just about ten hours. Awesome.

            I glanced around at the other two in the car. Both Red and Kyle were totally konked out. I figured I knew why Red was taking a snooze, but Kyle was a different story. Still, we were on a road trip to find Kenny, after all. The guy probably hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since he’d started planning this thing. I turned down the radio even lower than it already was.

            A few minutes later a buzzing sounded from my right, and Red jerked up in his seat, blinking blearily and looking confused. He looked over at me as the buzzing kept up.

            “Your phone,” I reminded him helpfully, and he nodded, digging through his pockets and pulling it out. He stared at the display for a long moment, sleepy look turning into an irritated frown.

            “Who is it?” I asked, and he sighed.

            “I don’t know,” He answered as the phone stopped buzzing. He put it into the cup holder at the side of the seat and slouched down in the seat again, eyes sliding closed.

            “Is it the same number from before?” I asked. He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply. A few minutes passed, and suddenly the phone started buzzing again. Red opened his eyes and glared at it for a moment, then reached out and picked it back up. Looked at the display. Dropped it back in the cup holder.

            “Maybe you should answer it and tell them they have the wrong number?” I offered. Red shifted on the seat and muttered something. The phone started buzzing again. For a long moment Red didn’t move, and then he picked the phone back up, slid the back off, pulled the battery out, and dropped all three pieces back into the cup holder. I stared at him in shock for a moment.

            “That was a little-“ I started.

            “I’m tired.” Red interrupted shortly, snappishly, and curled up on the seat with his face to the passenger side window. I winced and turned my attention back to the road. I had no idea what was going on, but something told me this was more than phone rage. I glanced at the dismantled cell phone in the cup holder and frowned. Something didn’t feel right. I sighed, and looked out the windshield. There were clouds at the horizon, a dark line. I hummed along with the song on the radio and hoped it wouldn’t rain.


	6. Never There

_The sun hung bloated over the western horizon, shimmering among a red sky._

_He frowned, felt the tell-tale tingle along his spine. He’d stay home today, and maybe the next day too._

_Nothing good ever came under the red morning sun._

****

 

            Our second day started out with dark skies and low clouds. Red took the first leg out while I nursed a large cup of bitter motel coffee and tried to keep my eyes from gluing themselves shut. It was an oddly silent ride in the car, even with the radio turned up, and I couldn’t get either Red or Kyle interested in a decent conversation. I spent most of the morning staring out either the windshield or the passenger side window, watching the rain washed landscape scroll by as we made our way out of Utah and into Idaho.

            I switched into the driver’s seat outside of Boise. Honestly, I was kind of interested in the city itself and wouldn’t have minded at least driving through it, but saying Kyle was jumpy would’ve been an understatement. He sat in the back of the car after the rest stop and started poring over a road map, tracing our route from Boise to Coos Bay and calculating times. He was getting pretty damn OCD about the whole thing and I wasn’t about to bother him when he was like that.

            Red wasn’t a much better occupant. While he responded to my attempts at small talk, he stayed focused on his phone for most of the day, tapping away at the keypad almost as soon as a text came in and answering me distractedly at best. I didn’t really like it; I was getting a strange vibe from the whole situation. Last night he was bristling every time his phone went off, and now he was acting like every text he got was the most important thing in the world? It was annoying, and not at all how he usually acted, but… whatever. Maybe Ollie or Henrietta wanted to talk about something, and like usual they’d rather text than call, because they were weird like that.

            Eventually I stopped trying to make conversation at all, humming along with the music on the radio instead and trying to keep us on the right path. Kyle would occasionally look up from his map to let me know if I was heading in the right direction but that was the entire extent of conversation in the car for the part of the trip. The drizzle followed us all the way to Oregon, or rather, we drove further into the cloud cover as we went. That was just the way the jet stream worked, so I guess I should have been expecting the down pour that greeted us when we finally drove into Coos Bay.

            I didn’t, of course.

            “God dammit, where did this rain come from?” I growled, putting the wipers on high and trying to see in front of the car.

            “From the ocean, most likely heading a cold front,” Red supplied helpfully from the passenger seat.

            “Thank you Mr. Weatherman,” I grimaced as the rain suddenly intensified, splattering heavily against the windshield. First sentence I got out of him in five hours of driving and it just had to be an answer to a rhetorical question. Of course.

            “T-there’s a motel j-just down the s-street,” Kyle said, leaning forward between the front seats and trying to look out the windshield himself. “A S-super 8.”

            I just nodded and drove onward, keeping my eyes open for any motel signs and hoping we found it soon. Thankfully it wasn’t far, and I was pulling into a parking spot in a canopied lot pretty soon. We grabbed our stuff out of the car and headed to the office in silence. The motel was, well, pretty motel like; two floors of rooms all serviced by the same office. An older man sat reading a newspaper behind the desk. He looked like he’d weathered a few harsh storms himself over the years, and wasn’t any worse for the wear. He said little, just asked for ID’s and how long we’d need to stay. Soon enough we had keys to a double room and we headed back outside to find it.

            215 was the magic number, and we headed up the first staircase we got to, glancing at the nearby doors to get our bearings. The upper walkway had an overhanging roof, but the wind had picked up a bit and sent the rain slashing sideways, and we were all cold and soaked by the time we found our door. Red opened the door and I headed inside behind him, flipping the lights on as soon as I walked by the switch. The room wasn’t too big, but decent sized for the two beds inside. There was only one dresser, but two bedside tables, a cheap little desk under one window, and a few chairs.

            Kyle started pacing before we even got the door closed, and I sat on one of the beds and watched him for a bit. Red disappeared into the bathroom for a little while, and came back out carrying some towels. He tossed one to me, and looked over at Kyle for a moment.

            “You’re being a bit distracting,” He said finally, handing the redhead a towel when he came close.

            “S-shut up, I’m t-t-thinking,” Kyle muttered, rubbing the towel over his hair absent-mindedly, and continued to pace. Red walked over to the bed I was on and sat at the head of it, leaning back against the backboard. I looked over at him and grinned, but all he did was give me an odd look in response, one I couldn’t place.

            “What?” I asked, grin faltering.

            “Nothing,” He said shortly, running his fingers through his hair. His bangs were plastered against his forehead at a slant, and he pulled at them and tried to push them to one side. I watched him, not like I had anything better to do right then, but after a moment he let out an irritated puff of breath and started rubbing his own towel through his hair, covering his face, like he was trying to ignore me. Rather, like he _was_ ignoring me. I frowned, annoyed, and tried to figure out what I did this time. Problem was, I didn’t remember doing anything at all, so I couldn’t understand his behavior.

            I turned back around to find Kyle at the small desk under the window, laptop plugged in and booting up. He sat rigidly in the wooden chair, staring out the window at the rain clouds outside.

            “Plans, KB?” I asked, wondering how wet the bedsheets I was sitting on were getting.

            “I’ll g-go there t-tomorrow,” Kyle said after a moment, slowly and thoughtfully, then turned to look at me. “Alone.”

            His eyes were a bit too sharp for my liking; less like the violence of daggers and more like… stilettos. All hidden danger dressed up in a pretty package. I wasn’t sure I wanted him going out to find Kenny alone, but I was horribly aware that I didn’t have a choice in it anyway. I grinned at him.

            “All right, you’ll know where to find us if you need us,” I answered, and he visibly relaxed. His eyes didn’t change though, at least not in that short moment before he turned back to his laptop. If the fates weren’t total dicks then maybe we’d be able to avert disaster tomorrow. Maybe.

            “I’m gonna go take a shower,” I announced, standing up. Silence from the desk. Silence from the bed.

            Right.

            I grabbed my bag off the floor and headed to the bathroom, humming a few lines of a random song as I did. It felt like it was going to be a long night.

 

****

 

            Kyle hadn’t been gone five minutes before I realized that something was Not Right.

            I was sitting at the desk, surfing the net on Kyle’s laptop, checking my mail for the third time in as many minutes and maybe, just maybe, looking up a guinea pig cage or two. Not that I was serious about it or anything, I was just interested. Red was on the bed we’d claimed the night before, leaning back on a pile of pillows with his knees pulled up almost to his chest, not saying anything and not really doing anything either. It had been raining heavy all night and it was still drizzling even though it was mid-morning, but the weather forecast I found online said it would clear up by the afternoon. I was thinking about maybe wandering around town a bit and finding a place for lunch when Red suddenly spoke up.

            “You were talking in your sleep last night,” He said tonelessly. I frowned, more from the surprise of hearing him say something, finally, than what he said.

            “Was it something funny?” I asked, opening a webpage in a new tab.

            “No.” Red’s answer was short, almost snappish, and this time with a tone that made it obvious he hadn’t liked what he’d heard.

            I paused in my typing, trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about. I knew I occasionally talked in my sleep, but Red usually told me what I’d said. He usually didn’t act so distant about it, either. I turned to face him, confused and a bit wary. He was hard enough to read normally; I still couldn’t get a good reading on him when he was pissed. Damn, half the time I had a hard time figuring out whether he was pissed at all.

            He was pissed now, though. Even though he knew I’d turned towards him he still kept staring at his phone, just staring at it like he was trying to not notice anything else at all. I thought he might even be seething, just a bit, but when he finally looked at me I couldn’t see it in his eyes at all. I couldn’t see anything in his eyes.

            “Why do you want a guinea pig?” Red asked, his voice too level and way too controlled. I shrugged, running my palms against my pants. I wasn’t sure if I should answer. “Why a guinea pig?”

            “Just thought it’d be nice to have a pet around,” I answered, trying to look towards him but not meet his eyes. It was much harder than it should be.

            “Why not get a dog, if you want a pet?” Red asked, his voice dropping just a little. “You used to have a dog.”

            “There’s no room in the apartment for a dog,” I answered, but maybe I was too quick with that. Too nervous, I could feel my mouth going dry. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, I wished he’d stop.

            “You didn’t even consider a dog. You didn’t consider a cat, or a bird, or even a fish,” Red said, voice dropping even lower. He wore his mask too well; I didn’t like it when he wore it like that.

            “What are you getting at?” I said, my voice sounding hoarse even to my own ears. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to say but it was what came out.

            “Is your entire life going to be overshadowed by _him_?” He spat his words this time, and I could see the heat rise in his eyes. I swallowed thickly, trying to look away but trying not to look away too. I didn’t feel guilty – _I didn’t feel guilty_ – I just felt conflicted.

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said finally. Red didn’t answer that, not right away at least.

            “It’s getting obsessive, Stan, it’s getting _sick_.” His voice faltered, just a little, but I couldn’t look at him. “You’re getting sick. Do you even see what you’re doing?”

            I put a hand to my head, clutched fingers in my hair. I hadn’t noticed when my hands started shaking but I noticed then. I tried very hard not think, and even harder not to respond. I just didn’t know what it was he wanted, what it was that mattered.

            I heard the slight squeak of bedsprings as Red got up from the bed, and looked over to see him standing with his back to me, facing the far wall. He stayed like that for a while, the silence in the room deafening. When he turned around I couldn’t figure out whether he looked angry or scared. Or maybe it was both.

            “What if I didn’t dye my hair this time? What if I let it grow out, what would you do?” He asked, his voice controlled again, much too controlled for the face he was wearing. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say but I knew what he was asking. There was a churning in my stomach and a burning at the back of my throat and I really didn’t want him to keep asking me questions I didn’t want to answer.

            “You shouldn’t… you _can’t_ compare it like that,” I shouldn’t have been letting myself talk at all, I dug myself in too deep whenever I did. My fingers clenched tighter in my hair as the churning in my stomach worsened. “You’re totally different, and… and what does it matter, anyway?”

            I looked over at him, choking back that awful feeling in my gut. He watched me for a long moment, just staring straight at me with his back too rigid and his face too cold and his eyes too distant, and I just stared back, dropping my hand back into my lap. After a moment he moved, stepping forward in that slow, purposeful way I knew all too well from our previous arguments. Short bursts of panic shot off in my head as he got closer, even though I had no reason for it, he’d never given me a reason for it, but they were coming from the nervousness and that sick gut feeling and that horrible sensation that I’d just fucked up so horribly I wouldn’t be able to drag myself out of it.

            “It matters, Stan,” Red said, his voice soft and low as he leaned over just slightly to look me straight in the eyes. “Because I’m your boyfriend, and I shouldn’t have to fight with a _dead boy_ for your attention.”

            He turned around sharply and walked back across the room, grabbing his jacket off of the end of the bed, and walked outside. He didn’t even slam the door when he left.

            I sat there for a short while, staring at the door and biting my lip. My self-restraint was lacking, and the bile was bitter on my tongue, and I was stumbling to the bathroom and heaving my breakfast into the toilet soon enough.

            I felt sick even after it was all gone, sick and dirty and utterly confused.

            I didn’t know what he was talking about.

_He_ didn’t know what he was talking about.

I flushed the toilet and I brushed my teeth, and then I walked back into the room and sat down on the chair and waited for someone to come back.

 

****

 

The creak of the motel room door woke me up from one of the strangest dreams I’ve had in a long while. I was in a jungle but the trees were too big and the canopy was too high up for me to see. There were giant neon colored mushrooms growing around me and nests made out of grasses and logs. Everything was dark and quiet and unchanging. I could hear voices, but they were only in my head. I was so utterly alone.

I rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands and turned to see who it was that came in. The door closed with a slam, and Kyle stalked further into the room, looking deep in thought and none too happy about whatever he was thinking about. I turned back around and put my chin back on my arms.

“Did you talk to him?” I asked, not really caring at the moment. The sky outside the window was clear blue and sunny.

“What?” Kyle asked distractedly. I sighed and repeated myself, louder this time, and heard him walk over to one of the beds and sit down.

“No,” He answered that time. He sounded angry, and I turned slightly to look at him. He looked angry. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him and he was staring at the wall all too intently. Not good signs.

“Why?” I had to ask, that was my job here. He shrugged, and looked at me. I was expecting him to have an angry expression but it was more of a nervous expression when I actually looked at it. Maybe I just wasn’t very good at differentiating between the two; that would actually explain a lot.

“I s-saw him,” He said, a bit quietly. His hands were clenched so tight his knuckles were turning white.

“But you didn’t talk to him?” I asked, running fingers through my hair and sitting up fully to look towards him. He shook his head slowly, and I sighed. “Why?”

“D-didn’t know w-w-what to say…” He said, and looked down at his hands. I watched him for a moment.

“So what now?” I asked, tapping my fingers on the desk. Kyle shrugged again, then tilted his head to look towards me from under his bangs.

“Home?” He said, hopefully. I grimaced.

“Kyle Broflovski, are you trying to run away?” I said, in as serious a tone as I could. He looked angry then, his lips narrowing to a thin line and his eyes sparking.

“He l-looked _happy_ ,” He said, like that would explain everything. I ran my fingers through my hair again, even though I didn’t need to, and stared at him.

“So? We drove all this way so you could just look at him?” I growled, “That’s a hell of an effort to go through just to stalk someone for one day.”

“W-what am I s-s-supposed to d-do?” Kyle growled right back, glaring at me full on now.

“You’re supposed to go over there and talk to him, like you planned to,” I said, standing up and pointing towards the door. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. “ _That_ is what you’re supposed to do.”

Kyle bit his lip and looked back at the wall. What the fuck was going on.

“Seriously, this is how it’s going to end here?” I asked, shocked and pissed off. Two days of driving through boring ass states, nonstop for hours at a time, all to get here and just turn back around. All of it just for nothing.

“Where’s Red?” Kyle asked suddenly.

“Who knows? I don’t, and I don’t really care right now,” I spat. I was a little surprised just how much I meant that. I walked over to Kyle and held my hand out.

“What?” He asked, eyeing both me and my hand warily.

“Address. Give it.” I motioned with my fingers. His eyes narrowed.

“No.” He said slowly. I glared at him.

“Give me the fucking address, Kyle,” I said, low voice and proper enunciation. Kyle just shook his head, and it took every freaking ounce of self control I had to keep myself from slapping him in the face. I was so sorely tempted.

“What the f-f-fuck is w-wrong with y-you?” He said angrily, standing up and getting face to face with me. I tended to forget he was a good few inches taller than me, and he was trying to use it to his advantage in this whole little intimidation game.

“It’s obvious you don’t have the fucking balls to go talk with him, so just give me the address and I’ll go myself,” I said glaring at him just as hard as he was glaring at me. The color had risen in his cheeks, and I could just vaguely see his fists clenching and unclenching at the edge of my vision. If he was a bull he’d be scratching the ground with his hoof right now.

Kyle reached into his pocket suddenly and slapped a piece of paper against my chest, hard. I barely managed to catch it as he let go suddenly, dropping back to sit on the bed edge again. I resisted sending him a dirty look and tucked the paper into my jeans pocket. I grabbed my keys from the bedside table and pulled on my shoes, leaving the motel room without a look back.

I didn’t see Red on my way down to the Civic but I wasn’t actually looking for him either. Unlocking the door I sat down in the driver’s seat and pulled out the paper Kyle had given me. It was a list of directions written out in his perfect handwriting. The guy really shouldn’t have handwriting that was so insanely ideal but maybe that just came with growing up in a house like his. I looked them over and started the car. It didn’t look like it was too far away, and Kyle had said he could walk there easily.

I stuck a random CD in the radio and turned up the volume until I couldn’t hear myself think, and pulled out of the parking lot. Maybe, just maybe, I could salvage at least this part of the stupid trip we were on. The realization that I’d probably just seriously and horrendously pissed off both of the people (boyfriend and super best, no less) that were on this trip with me bubbled up in the back of my mind, but I shoved it away and pressed the gas pedal harder. First things first; Kenny was somewhere close, closer than he had been in two years, and there was no way in hell I was going to let him slip away again.


	7. Got A New Low

The final road I turned onto was full of small, two-story houses at the edge of the bay. Most of the houses were far back from the street, with huge front yards and tall trees surrounding them. It looked like a pretty damn nice area to live in, if not as upscale as most people would want. I drove slowly down the street, eyeing mailboxes for addresses, and pulled into the driveway of the sixth house on the street. It was wide enough to fit two cars, no garage, and I pulled up next to a dark green covered pick-up and put the car into park. For a minute I sat there in the car, a nervous churning starting up in my gut.

            What was I going to say? What could I say? What if Kevin answered the door?

            Suddenly, I understood why Kyle had come back.

            I gritted my teeth and got out of the damn car. I said I’d do it and I would, damn it, I wasn’t going to wimp out now that I was here.

            Stamping down the nervous churning I walked over to the front steps of the house, taking a good look at the place as I did. The paint was a faded blue, flaking in places but looking decent enough. Reaching the door I rang the doorbell and stepped back to wait. Hopefully someone was in the house; hopefully, that someone was Kenny.

            I didn’t have long to wait, the door opened suddenly and without the creak I’d been expecting. In front of me stood a guy that I wasn’t entirely sure I recognized. At least a few years older than me, taller and stockier than I’d remembered him being, if I was remembering him right. Damn, it had been way too long. I grinned uneasily.

            “Hey Kevin, don’t know if you remember me…” I trailed off a little as his eyes narrowed a bit, my mind racing back to all the theories and rumors that had shot around the town after his run from town. So many rumors, and none of them good.

            Kevin leaned against the doorframe, nonchalant and unaffected, and for a moment he was so similar to Kenny it was almost painful. I hadn’t realized I’d missed the blonde that much.

            “Ah remember you,” He said finally, eyes still narrowed but a smirk on his face. He looked like he knew something, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Yer the Marsh kid.”

            “Y… yeah. That’s me.” I hadn’t expected him to recognize me that well. I couldn’t remember spending any time around him when I was younger.

            “That red-head kid was hanging ‘round here before…” Kevin sounded a bit amused, and I was getting a bit more nervous before. “Thought Ah was seein’ things, but now yer here…”

            His face grew darker then, more serious and harder than I’d expected it to be able to get. I knew those kinds of looks, they were dangerous looks. Very-nearly-explosive looks.

            I grinned and tried to look innocent.

            “I was just wondering if Kenny was around?” I asked, hoping that wasn’t a trigger phrase. For a moment he continued to give me the same hard look, the tension rising thick and stifling between us. The slam of a door from further in the house broke through the silence, and a familiar voice moved towards us.

            “Hey Kev, I put the mower blades back on and…” Kenny’s voice trailed off as he entered the front room, eyes passing past Kevin and meeting mine.

            He was there. He was _real_. Kyle was _right_.

            I was shocked mute, wanting to say something, anything, but nothing would come out. All I could do was stare at him in the same utter disbelief he was staring at me.

            He didn’t look _bad_ , I had to admit. Whatever life they were living here, it was decent enough to keep them both fed and dressed. I gave myself a mental kick for that thought, like they were just carrying the poor around with them in their blood, like they couldn’t be just normal everyday middle class people like the rest of us. I bit my lip, realizing that Kenny actually looked _better_ than he had that last year I had seen him, not so thin and not so worn and not so run through a shredder. He did look happy, just like Kyle said. I almost felt bad for interrupting.

            Then a grin blossomed across his face, and it grew into a smile, and he was moving forward, tossing aside the dirty rag he’d been wiping his hands on and pushing Kevin away from the door.

            “Stan? What the hell!” He looked excited. Ecstatic. I didn’t know what to do when he grabbed me in a hug, his arms wrapping tight around me. I tried to reply but I hadn’t found my voice yet, and resorted to just putting my arms around him, awkwardly but I meant it all the same.

            “What’re you doing here?” He said a bit breathlessly, letting me go and looking at my face like he could read my mind like that. “Wait, come on, come in.”

            He pulled me inside and past Kevin. The older guy was leaning against the wall just inside the door, wearing a defeated look. I almost felt bad for him, but I wondered why he looked like that all the same. I didn’t have much time to think about it, since Kenny pulled me all the way to the kitchen, just like when we were younger, only more excited, and only let go to walk over to the fridge and pull the door open.

            “Want a Sam Adams?” He asked, giving me an expectant look over the fridge door.

            “Uh…” I was tempted. “No, thanks, you got any sodas?”

            He gave me an odd look, a very odd one, then shrugged and pulled out a couple of drinks and motioned towards the kitchen table. I sat down and he put a can of Cherry Coke down in front of me. I grinned; he’d remembered. Popping the can open I watched him take a seat down across from me, twisting the cap off of his own bottle of Sam Adams. I heard the front door close, but didn’t hear Kevin moving around out front.

            “It’s you,” Kenny said, grinning. I grinned back, feeling relieved and nowhere near as nervous as I had been before. It was weird feeling like that, like he’d just left to go to the store and he’d finally made it back and that’s all it ever was. Even though it wasn’t anything like that, and he hadn’t come back, and we had to drive through four states to get to the store he was at and we weren’t even sure if he’d ever be leaving it.

            “It’s you too,” I said, and he laughed, and I took a sip of my coke and leaned back in my chair.

            “How’d you get here?” He asked, puzzled in the best of ways.

            “Drove,” I answered, and he looked surprised. “Kyle’s the one who found you.”

            His expression faltered at that, his grin slipping just a bit and a flicker of something going through his eyes. He took a long drink of his beer, looking down at the floor for a moment after he put it back down.

            “How is he?” He asked, looking back at me finally. I shrugged and sighed and twirled the soda can.

            “Not sure how to answer that,” I answered, honestly. His face darkened, and he frowned. For a moment neither one of us said anything. The moment was way too awkward and not what it was supposed to be and I kind of regretted bringing Kyle up if this is what happened. I would have had to anyway, but still.

            “I was gonna go back,” Kenny said finally, looking at me and grinning sadly. “I was. That was the plan.”

            I just nodded, and he looked away.

            “It’s not that I didn’t want you guys to know, I just…” He bit his lip, and looked down at the table. I watched him, trying not to stare but interested in seeing if he would say anything else.

            “Cartman found me,” He said after another long pause while I was taking a drink of my coke. I almost choked. “Just once. I couldn’t get in touch with him after that, and he didn’t call again…”

            “You could have called one of us,” I said softly, trying not to sound like an ass but in a situation like that almost anything would’ve made me sound like an ass. “You could have called Kyle, he was really…”

            I stopped myself from saying more, he really didn’t need to hear about it, not right then, and I didn’t want to guilt trip him.

            He stared at the beer bottle, tilting it and rolling it one way and then the other along its bottom edge.

            “It was my fault,” He said finally, pursing his lips in thought and sliding the beer bottle around on the table in little circles. “Everything about Kyle was my fault.”

            I made a noise to disagree, but he shook his head. He looked at me, his eyes shockingly clear.

            “I got away, Stan. I got out here and… I didn’t want to go back,” His voice choked a little at the end, and he looked away, out the kitchen window. I followed his gaze and found myself looking at the trunk of a large tree. Beyond that stood a line of evergreen bushes bordering a wooden fence. I could barely make out the neighbor’s house beyond it between the branches of low trees on the other side.

            “Ken…” I started, but frowned. I didn’t know what I wanted to ask.

            “I couldn’t give him what he wanted, and he couldn’t be what I needed,” Kenny said, paused to run a hand through his hair. “I… I think I might have led him on.”

            “Wait, you… you _think_?” I asked, leaning forward and looking at him closely. He turned his eyes back to me, looking a bit helpless.

            “I mean, yeah. You know? I didn’t know… I didn’t _mean_ to…” He said, cupping the bottle on the table in front of him in both hands.

            “Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?” I eyed him critically, and he gave me the same look right back.

            “I don’t know, what do you think we’re talking about?” He said, his voice dropping a bit low. I bit my lip. He spun the bottle between his palms. Did I want to go there?

            “What couldn’t you give him?” I asked finally. I didn’t like the way his eyes hardened at that.

            “He needed attention. Desperately,” He grimaced, “I took it all away. It’s true, don’t give me that look. I lived there. I know what went on.”

            He focused his eyes on me, bit his lip.

            “I needed a family, but Kyle… Kyle wanted _everything_ …” He fidgeted with the bottle. “I… I just didn’t want him to hate me…”

            I didn’t like the way this was starting to sound.

            “Did something happen?” I was surprised at how calm my voice sounded. The can in my hands was dented at the sides and I couldn’t remember squeezing it. Kenny shook his head slowly, but I couldn’t tell if he was answering my question or just trying to get his thoughts straight.

            “Kyle could be really selfish, but only if you went along with it. He’d argue with you until you agreed, and then if you didn’t he’d blame himself for trying to force you. He’d blame himself and then he’d…” Kenny cut off, really shaking his head this time. He gave me a look, all hopeless and helpless and pitying. “I’m sorry Stan.”

            “What?” I asked, thrown off track. He sighed.

            “First time we see each other in two years and I just go off…” He sighed again, releasing his grip on the beer bottle and leaning back in his chair.

            “No, it’s cool- “

            “It’s not,” He interrupted, giving me a look. “It’s too much for you. You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

            “I have no idea what’s going on. Or went on. Whatever.” I placed my can on the table with utmost precision and turned my gaze on him. “Kyle was here earlier.”

Kenny looked surprised. I’d been wondering if he’d noticed anything like Kevin had, but apparently he hadn’t.

“He was supposed to talk to you, but he chickened out and came back.” I bit back the bitter tone that tried creeping into my words and watched the blonde for a reaction. It wasn’t what I’d expected.

“Good.” He said, avoiding my eyes and picking at the label on the bottle.

“Good?” I couldn’t avoid the surprised tone.

“I don’t want to go back,” He muttered, peeling a long piece of the label off of the bottle with a loud rip.

“He wasn’t going to try to get you to go back,” I explained, but Kenny snorted and continued peeling the rest of the label.

“But I would’ve,” He picked at a spot where the glue was exceptionally thick.

“No you wouldn’t-“

“I think I know what I would’ve done better than you,” He growled, looking at me finally. His eyes were blazing, deep blue and dangerous. I sputtered my words, burned by blue fire.

“Why?” It wasn’t the right question to ask, but I wasn’t sure what the right question was, or if a question was even what needed to be said.

“I told you!” He was exasperated, defeated. He tangled his fingers in his hair and focused on spot on the table.

I couldn’t think of what he’d said that would answer the question, but I maybe I just wasn’t able to put the pieces together right. I’d ask Red when I got back, but he probably wasn’t going to be talking to me, and I didn’t want to ask Kyle because I doubt I’d get any further than I was getting here. I felt alone suddenly, utterly and wholly alone. Everyone was living a life that I couldn’t reach and I was all alone in this little bubble with no interaction with the outside.

I thought of how lonely a person had to be to do anything and everything just to be accepted and not hated.

I thought of how selfish a person had to be to stoop so low and try to get someone to love them with an act so drastic it nearly ended their life.

I thought of how horrible it must be to wake up and see that nothing’s changed, that things only got worse.

I thought that there was a lot that I understood but that most of it I just didn’t want to accept.

I swallowed thickly and tapped the can in front of me. Kenny disentangled his fingers from his hair and rubbed his eyes.

“Are you gonna be here long?” His voice sounded hollow.

“We have to leave in the morning,” I croaked. My throat felt sore and I didn’t know from what.

“D’you wanna take a walk?” He asked, his voice low. I looked over to see him looking at me with hopeful eyes. I nodded, and we got up, leaving the can and the bottle on the table behind us.

Kenny led the way out the back door and across the backyard. It was a decent size, with the border of evergreen bushes on the right and a shed at the fence on the left. We went out through a gate in the fence and walked down a gravel alleyway towards a main street. For a while we walked without talking, down sidewalks and past houses and gates and yards.

“Wanna see where I work?” The blonde asked finally, turning to give me a crooked grin. He looked sixteen again. I grinned back and hoped it looked believable.

“Sure.”

Down the street and across another, winding through neighborhoods and occasionally crossing open yards, and the smell of ocean grew stronger. Much stronger. I couldn’t believe you could taste salt in the air but by the time we got to the docks I was breathing it in with each breath. Unbelievable.

We stood in front of a large fishing boat finally, and Kenny started talking about nets and hauls and creel limits and open water. He’d started on a smaller boat and worked his way up through different crews, each time working his ass off for a month or two and then ending up jobless when the boat capsized, or the captain sold the boat off, or the hauls weren’t as good as expected. Bad luck, and he laughed then, and said each boat was better than the last, and this one was the best of all.

“You like the ocean?” I asked, looking out at the gray-green-blue expanse.

“It’s terrifying. It’s dangerous and unpredictable and deadly.” He said it all with a sigh, like he was talking about a tempestuous lover. I was waxing poetic, but I couldn’t care. He turned to me and his eyes glittered almost the same color as the ocean and the sky. “I love it. There’s no other way to feel about it, not once you get to know it. No other way.”

Maybe he _was_ talking about a lover. Lover. I tried to grin but I couldn’t. It was such a stupid word.

“What’s wrong?”

I barely realized he had said something. Clearing my throat, I shook my head and put my hands in my pockets. The air smelled of brine.

“Nothing,” I said, watching the flight of a single seagull. It turned in a large spiral, round and round. “I just keep messing up.”

“Girlfriend?” He asked, sympathetic. My expression must’ve changed, because he fixed that pretty quick. “ _Boy_ friend.”

He sounded pretty certain. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and caught him grinning that crooked grin. Bastard.

“Bet you can’t guess who,” I muttered. He frowned thoughtfully, eyeing me up and down for a long moment.

“Goth boy, what’s his name… Red? Red.” He said with a certainty that had me giving him the most surprised look I had ever managed. He looked pleased. “I’m right, right? Knew it.”

“Wait, what?” My mind wasn’t processing the moment correctly. Kenny, of course, was amused.

“Come on, guy’s had a boner for you since like, sixth grade. Figured he’d get you eventually,” He chuckled. That was a surprise.

“Wha… he did? No he didn’t… did he?” I couldn’t remember sixth grade that well. Kenny rolled his eyes. “How the hell do you know?”

He gave me a look.

“Don’t question my information, Marsh,” He tapped his temple. “I know. Leave it at that.”

I shrugged and left it at that. Kenny the mind reader, somehow it made sense. We stayed silent for a little while, and I watched the waves crash against the breakwater out in the bay. The boats around us swayed in the wake of smaller waves, rocking and bobbing slightly. Kenny looked at me without looking straight at me, curiously. He was probably waiting for me to say something, but what was I going to say? There wasn’t enough time in the day.

            “You look happy,” I said after a while, still staring out across the water. Kenny snorted.

            “You don’t,” He replied, and I felt his eyes on me. My shoulders stiffened, I felt a tingle at the back of my neck. I knew what was coming, and I turned to face him hesitantly.

            “What?” My voice was too quiet; the question was unnecessary.

            “Four years ago you told me you’d talk to someone,” He said, unnecessarily slowly and precisely. I avoided his eyes and looked at the waterline of the boat. “Three years ago you said the same thing, and two years ago, and I’m guessing if I was there you would have told me the same thing these last two years too.”

            “It’s not a problem…” It was scary how easily the words came out of my mouth. Robotically, mechanically. “It’s all right. I can deal with it.”

            “Bullshit. Tell me it isn’t causing problems for you,” Kenny took a step in my direction and I glanced at him in reflex. He didn’t look happy now. “Look me in the eyes and tell me it’s not affecting your life anymore.”

            I looked him in the eyes and I opened my mouth but I couldn’t say a word. Everything I wanted to say in reply floated around in my head but I couldn’t catch the words. Like a fish out of water I gasped and struggled for words that weren’t coming.

            “I can’t be the one to help you with this,” He was pleading now.

            “I don’t need you to help me,” I answered, grasping at the words and pulling them out and into the air between us. He grimaced and he frowned.

            “That’s your problem, you think you don’t need help _at all_.” He sighed, as if he was certain that saying anything to me wasn’t going to change a thing. “You’re not fucking Superman, you know? And you don’t have to be.”

            I just nodded, automatically, and he sighed again, quieter this time. I’d missed these conversations, I realized, for all the pain they brought back. It was addictive, picking a scab that’ll never heal. I felt raw and exposed, but that was just how Kenny made me feel. An enigma wrapped in mystery and he could tell everything about me with just a glance. I wondered, sometimes, why we weren’t closer friends. It would’ve been a strange symbiosis, me and him.

            “I didn’t mean you don’t look happy now, Stan. I mean, you don’t, but that’s not what I was talking about,” Kenny paused and looked at me with eyes so concerned I couldn’t look back. I felt backed into a corner on that dock, ocean and air around me but I couldn’t move. “You’re not living.”

            His words were a pleasant buzz in my ears. I heard them but I didn’t focus because I didn’t want to, it was easier not to. I felt a pressure on my arm. Kenny had his hand wrapped around my wrist and his eyes were still on me, still dark and conflicted. I grinned at him and he sighed and tried a grin back.

            “Come on, let’s head back,” He said, and I followed. He didn’t take his hand off of my wrist and I couldn’t decide which one of us was the anchor, me or him. Maybe both of us were. The walk was as silent as the one before, and we crossed the same streets and yards, walking slower and slower as we neared his house.

            “Promise me,” He said as we stood in front of the Civic. I nodded; I knew what he wanted. He shook his head, and narrowed his eyes at me. “Promise me you’ll talk to someone.”

            I wanted to, and I wondered if he knew that. I would, eventually. One day.

“One Day” wasn’t what needed to happen, though, and not what he was asking for. I licked my lips and frowned.

            “Will you talk to Kyle?” Dragged straight out of left field, that one. It left him staggering, if only mentally, but I could see the flicker in his eyes. He glared at me, like this was a dirty trick.

I wasn’t the only one letting the past weigh me down, and he was an idiot if he thought I couldn’t figure that much out.

            “Fine,” he said, spat, like he was being asked to do some dirty deed with something disgusting and vile. He’s terrified, I realized, but then again, so was I.

            “Fine.” That was all the promise he was getting. “We’re at the Super 8.”

            He nodded and fidgeted a little, pulled out a cell phone from his pocket. We exchanged numbers without words, the air was too heavy for them. It was pulling the oxygen straight out of my lungs and my brain.

            “Call, whenever you want,” I said, unlocking the car door and pulling it open. He managed a grin then.

            “Will do,” He answered, and I shut the door and started the engine. He stepped back as I pulled out, raised a hand in goodbye. I wondered if he’d keep his promise, wondered if I would keep mine.

            Driving down the street, I thought back over the day. Was there anything that had gone right since this morning? I couldn’t find it, if there was. Maybe there would be, if Kenny kept his promise. Maybe we could salvage this stupid trip.

            I tried to keep my  eyes on the turns and street names but ended up getting lost anyways. Pulling a u-turn on a side street, I parked on the side and reread the directions. They were so simple it was probably a hidden talent of mine that made me lose my way. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Pulling back onto the main street, I took the right turn and got back on track. 


	8. Tremble For Yourself

I got back to the motel a little past seven. Locking up the Civic I headed up the stairs and made my way to the room. Hesitating at the door, unable to turn the knob, I bit my lip and tried not to let the fact that I’d been a total asshole earlier that day weigh me down too much. It wasn’t really working. I should’ve been pushing it all in the back of my mind, I should’ve been moving past, putting on a happy face, acting like it had all blown over, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

            I unlocked the door and went inside, pulling it shut behind me. Kyle and Red were sitting on the beds, eating out of take out containers and watching something on the room’s TV. They both looked over at me as I stood in front of the door, expectant. I didn’t like the feeling of their eyes on me, and avoided meeting gazes with either one of them, turning instead to kick my shoes off and shove them over by the wall. Turning back I found Kyle facing the TV again and Red looking into the container he was holding, digging through whatever was inside it with a fork. For a moment I didn’t know where to go; both of them were sitting in the middle of each of the beds, which left only the chair by the desk at the far side of the room. I wavered, uncertain, then noticed Red slide over, making room on the bed. His bangs had fallen over his eyes and I couldn’t tell if he was still looking into the takeout container or looking at me.

            Feeling horribly self-conscious I walked over and slid onto the bed myself, sitting on it awkwardly. Red flicked his bangs back, turned his head to look at me out of the corner of his eye.

            “I got you some Mongolian beef,” He said, eyeing me. I couldn’t read his expression but his voice sounded fine. I swallowed thickly and ran my palms down against my jeans.

            “I’m not hungry,” I answered, and he turned his head to face me better.

            “You really should eat something,” He said, voice low. Concerned. Were we fine now, then? I looked at the TV without registering what was playing. I should eat something, maybe, but the thought of Chinese food was making my stomach churn.

            “It’s cool, thanks though,” I said, turning back to Red, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore. Turning his gaze back onto the takeout container, he swirled something around with his fork and didn’t respond. I glanced over at Kyle. He was sitting cross legged on his bed, looking a bit uncomfortable and focusing on the TV a bit too much. After a long moment, his gaze shifted sideways, his eyes met mine. They were darkened, troubled. He looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t get it out, but that was fine. I knew what he was going to ask.

            “I talked to Kenny,” I said, and even with the TV on my voice seemed too loud in the room. The tension was thick, it was stifling. I looked down at my hands, noting a hole starting in the knee of my pants, just a tiny spot of wear. Time for a new pair. The bed moved, Red was shifting on it but I couldn’t tell if he was moving closer to me or further away.

            “W-what did he s-say?” Kyle’s voice wavered only slightly, and I looked back to find him looking at me curiously, sharply, like he was trying to pull the conversation out of my head through mind powers. I thought for a moment, tried to think of how to best answer that question. It didn’t take long for me to realize there was no best answer to that question.

            “He doesn’t want to come back,” I said softly, looking at Kyle to catch his reaction. His eyes dropped, his gaze turned to something that wasn’t there. I thought I saw his hands shake around the takeout container, but then he was repositioning himself on the bed, leaning back against the wall behind him and stretching his legs out in front of him. His eyes had narrowed, turned to the wall behind the TV, and while he was trying to strike a relaxed pose it wasn’t fooling anyone.

            “F-f-figured that,” He muttered, takeout container sitting loosely in his hands, forgotten. I sighed, running a hand through my hair.

            “I gave him my number, told him to call…” I said, wondering if I should mention what else I’d told the blonde. Better not, better not to and not get everyone’s hopes up. “He works on a fishing boat. Sounds like he likes it.”

            Kyle nodded wordlessly, the fierce look on his face softening. Watching him, I realized suddenly that he wasn’t the same person he was two years ago. He wasn’t the same person he’d been for so long. He looked cast down, but he didn’t look lost. He didn’t look confused. I bit my lip and envied him, when had he found the time to grow up? And why hadn’t I noticed? I wasn’t paying as much attention to things as I should’ve been, and it was becoming more and more obvious I needed to make a change before things really got out of control. Everyone’s changed, I realized. Red shifted on the bed again, moving closer so that our shoulders touched, and I could feel his warmth and his presence and I thought that this was all going wrong, this wasn’t how he was supposed to be acting on a day like today but maybe that was just my skewed vision of how things used to be and how I expected them to continue being. Everyone’s growing up except me, I’m still stuck in sophomore year, still stumbling down that leaf-strewn path and walking and walking but I can’t get away.

            I bit my lip, stared down hard at the hole starting in my jeans. The guilt, gone so long, came back, heavy and congealed, flooding my head and coating my tongue. I took a shuddering breath, wiped my trembling hands against my jeans. This wasn’t the moment, this wasn’t the time, I had to focus on the here and the now and push that aside for just a little longer. Just a little longer.

            “I’m g-gonna take a w-w-walk,” Kyle said, speaking softly. I nodded, unable to look up or say a word, and saw him walk across the room and out the door at the edges of my vision. The TV buzzed words and sounds for a while, but how long I couldn’t tell. I was trying to keep my mind stable, trying to keep my thoughts from wandering to those dark corners of my mind.

            “Did something happen?”

            I jolted at Red’s words, surprised to hear them come from so close. I forgot he was there, forgot where I was. I looked at him, and really looked at him. Black bangs falling over one eye, roots growing in a coppery auburn at his hairline. He could never keep up with them. His eyes were on me, dark and reflective. I wondered a lot about why he’d taken on the mask, why he was so good at keeping himself locked away. The façade cracked sometimes, though, like right then, when he leaned closer to me, his fingers touching my hand, his eyes open and honestly concerned. I resisted the urge to throw my arms around him, pull him close and breathe him in, bury myself in him and just let go.

            I resisted the urge, but for all the wrong reasons. I was feeling detached from him, distant, cold. I couldn’t bring myself to close the distance, to bridge that gap from that morning (was it only from that morning?). This was wrong, he shouldn’t be offering to comfort me, I shouldn’t be acting like I had nothing to be sorry about. There was too much guilt in me, and I was finally starting to see which guilt was real and which wasn’t. When you start mixing the past with the present so bad that you can’t figure out what was happening or happened, that’s when you know you have a problem. Denial hadn’t helped with my drinking and it wasn’t helping now, and I was just starting to realize that I had exchanged one debilitating addiction for another.

            It was disgusting. _I_ was disgusting.

I couldn’t lean into him, I couldn’t hide with him anymore. My thoughts moved in slow-motion, realization lit up point after point, dots connected and the justifications for everything I’d been doing up to this point broke down, bit by bit.

            “Stan?” Red shifted slightly, and I realized I had been staring at him for a while. I looked away, at the wall, at the TV. I wasn’t feeling good suddenly, my hands felt clammy and my head felt heavy.

            “I… I gotta go…” I pushed up off the bed, walking away towards the bathroom. I heard Red moving behind me as I opened the door and stumbled inside. My knees felt shaky, I felt weak. My stomach roiled painfully, and I nearly fell to as I dropped to my knees in front of the toilet. I hadn’t eaten since that morning, there was nothing to bring up but my stomach tried anyway. The bile burned my throat and I gagged on the bitter taste. Could I consider this my penance? A payment in part on the life I’d been choosing to live?

            I wanted to be good, I wanted someone to be proud of me, but on my terms. Always on my terms. I’d show them what they needed to see to make them believe what I wanted them to believe, and hide the rest. Sweep it under the carpet, shove it in a corner, dig a hole and bury it in the back of my mind. Maybe I should be grateful to have realized it so soon, realized how much of a failure I was. A failure at being a good son, a failure at being a good friend. A failure at being a good boyfriend.        

            “Stan, calm down,” Red’s voice was toned soothing, but it tore through me. I shuddered and gagged, trying to control my heaving. He placed a hand on my back, his touch cool. “Please, calm down.”

            I couldn’t take it. I shrugged out from under his hand, pulled away from him and managed to keep my mouth closed and my stomach relatively still.

            “Stan, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said… what I said earlier, it was completely out of place…”

He was being apologetic, his hand was still reaching towards me. I wanted to touch him, to grab him, to make him hold me until my stupid nerves and my stupid stomach and my stupid _everything_ calmed the fuck down and everything was normal again.

            “Shut up. Shut. UP.” I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth, whimpering slightly as my stomach tried to revolt again. “Why are you always apologizing? _What are you apologizing for?_ ”

            Red paused at that, his eyes widening just slightly as his hand lowered a bit. He shouldn’t be apologizing and he knew it, and after a moment he dropped his hand to his knee and he gave me a long look, a guarded shielded look that I couldn’t place. Something was happening here, something that wouldn’t have happened without this catalyst of a road trip.

            I stood up shakily, ran the tap and tried to rinse the bitter taste from my mouth. Even clean water was enough to make me gag again, my stomach heave. I clamped my mouth shut and leaned low over the sink, closing my eyes as I tried to fight down the nausea.         

            “Just calm down, Stan. You know it won’t stop unless you do,” Red said, exasperated, from where he was still crouched on the floor. _Exasperated_. There was a tone rarely heard. I tried to tell myself to breathe evenly, to not choke on that ragged feeling in my throat. The air in the bathroom felt tense, nervous. I opened my eyes and watched the water run from the tap, trying not to think, no, trying to think of what to say without thinking about what I didn’t want to think about. Red stood up finally, reaching past me to turn the off the faucet. I kept my gaze down, unable to look at him. I didn’t want to see the look on his face right now.

            The silence was broken by the sudden vibe of my cell phone. I wiped my hands on a nearby towel and reached into my pocket to pull my phone out of my pocket, Red brushing past me as I turned the display on.

 

KB

txt: 7:45pm

 

stan outside now plz

 

            Kyle? What the hell? I frowned, putting the phone back into my pocket, and left the bathroom. I felt utterly and totally crappy. Whatever. If Kyle wanted me outside, then… I guessed there was a good reason. Red was slouching back on one of the beds, paging through a book. He didn’t look up as I got my shoes on or grabbed my jacket.

            “Kyle’s outside, asked me to come out there,” I said, walking over to the door.

            “Why?” Red asked distractedly. I shrugged, and opened the door. I heard raised voices as soon as I stepped out, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.

            Directly in front of our door in the parking lot stood a cop car, red and blue lights flashing. My gut clenched; I hurried to the staircase and took the steps down two at a time. The cop car was in the middle of the parking lot. A very old, very angry lady was standing to one side with a young female cop, arguing loudly and pointing towards the sidewalk, where Kyle was standing with an older male cop, looking mildly worried.

            “That man took my purse! He took it! Well, I… I don’t have it on me, do I? Because he took it and hid it somewhere and won’t tell me where it is,” The old lady’s voice screeched through the air as the female cop tried to calm her down. I noticed a few people who were walking by stop to look what was going on. I swallowed thickly, ignoring the burning in my throat, and hurried over to where Kyle was standing with the other cop.

            “What’s going on?” I asked when I came up, and the cop turned to look at me. “I’m a friend of Kyle’s.”

            “L-lady just s-s-started going whacko,” Kyle muttered. The cop raised an eyebrow as he looked over a the old lady, then looked back at us.

            “Look, we know this lady. She has… problems.” The cop said, his voice low. I guessed he didn’t want anyone to overhear. Or maybe he didn’t want the old lady to overhear, as she had stalked her way closer to us across the parking lot, the female cop trying to get her to stop and listen to her. He paused to look at her for a moment, then continued. “Since we’ve been called out, we’ll have to run your id, but we’ll just tell her that we’ll be looking into the matter, and she’ll forget all about it by tomorrow.”  
            The cop looked down at his hand, and I saw with a shock he already had Kyle’s ID. I looked over at the redhead, and he gave me a helpless look.

            “From Colorado, hm? How long’re you staying?” The cop asked amiably, looking back at us.

            “N-not long,” Kyle replied, not meeting the cop’s eye. The cop looked like he was waiting for more, but neither of us spoke.

            “All right, I’ll be right back then, just wait here,” The cop said, turning around and heading towards the cop cruiser. I watched him for a moment, then looked at Kyle. He’d crossed his arms, holding his left arm tight to his body. He wouldn’t meet my eye, focusing his gaze somewhere on the sidewalk in front of him. I looked back at the cop. He was almost at the car.

            I didn’t really think then; if I did, I wouldn’t have moved. Cops say you wait, _you wait_. I couldn’t. I hurried over after him, passing Red as he stepped off the stairs. He gave me a questioning look.

            “Later,” I said quickly, rushing up the last few steps to get to the officer just as he got into his car. “Sir, can I talk to you really quick?”

            “You’re not going to tell me your friend’s confessing to stealing a non-existant purse, are you?” The officer chuckled, looking over Kyle’s ID. He was a friendly guy, apparently. I ran a hand through my hair and wondered what the hell I was doing.

            “It’s just… can you… can you maybe _not_ run his ID?” I asked quietly. The cop, having started to put the numbers into his little computer pad, stopped and looked over at me.

            “Its protocol, son. This is one thing we’re not able to just _not do_.” He looked suspicious now. I bit my lip and spared a glance back towards the sidewalk. I could see Red asking Kyle something, Kyle shrugging in answer. I looked back at the cop and watched as he put the numbers in. Seconds later the screen lit up with information.

            I looked away, the piercing voice of the old lady still ringing in the background. My knees felt shaky; I wanted to lean against the cop car, but that was taboo wasn’t it?

            “Hm,” The cop said after a moment, and I looked over at him. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see his expression.

            “What were you doing in Oregon?” He asked, still looking at the screen. His tone was serious and his face unreadable.

            “We were looking for an old friend of ours,” I said, coughed, my throat dry.

            “How long had you planned on staying?” He asked, leaning a bit out of the car to look at me.

            “We were going to leave tomorrow, Kyle has to be back by Saturday.” I said. For a moment he didn’t say anything, just gave me a piercing look.

            “Did you find them?” He asked, and I must have looked confused because he clarified. “That friend of yours.”

            “Oh, uh… Yeah. We did.” I answered, my voice a little hoarse. He gave me a long look.

            “According to protocol, I need to write up a report on this matter,” He said, his voice dropping low again. “Do you know what’s going to happen then?”

            “Y… yeah…” I answered quietly. Oh god, oh god oh god oh god. The churning in my stomach was back. This stupid trip was giving me ulcers, I was dead certain about that. I swallowed thickly, trying not to cough.

            “So why am I not going to fill out a report?”

            For a second I couldn’t understand what he was saying to me.

“W…what?” The idea seemed so foreign I didn’t know how to wrap my head around it.

“Why am I not going to fill out a report about this incident right here, even though I should?” The cop looked at me expectantly.

“I… look, he’s not a bad guy, at all. I know he looks like he’s easy to piss of but he’s a really good guy, h wouldn’t be stealing anyone’s purses, he’d… he’d be the guy looking for the purse and kicking the ass of the guy who stole it,” I tried to focus my thoughts. Fuck. _Fuck_. “He’s not even supposed to be here, I mean, no one even knows he’s not in Colorado right now. No one.”

“You two best friends?” The cop asked suddenly. I nodded enthusiastically.

“Yeah, since we were kids,” I said.

“Hm,” The cop looked away from me and towards the sidewalk. “Where’s your car?”

“Over there, the Civic,” I looked for it and pointed towards it. When I turned back the cop was looking straight at me.

“Your friend’s going to owe you,” The cop said, reaching over and tapping a button on the computer to clear the screen before continuing, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you your friend’s ID. I am going to tell that lady that everything is taking care of. I am going to take my partner and we are going to leave this parking lot, and I am currently not going to put in a report on anything that happened here.”  
            I couldn’t do anything more than stare at him. Dumbly, definitely. I wasn’t sure I was hearing what I was hearing.

            “We’re going to drive back around here in an hour, and if we see your car still here, that report goes through.” He finished. “Do you understand?”

            “Y-yes, yes sir.” I fumbled with my words, and took Kyle’s ID card from him as he offered it to me. “Thank you.”

            He waved my thanks away and motioned for me to get going. I hurried back to where Kyle and Red were standing, wondering how in hell we got so lucky. I was ready to grab all our stuff and dump in the car and get out of there. It was good to have something to focus on other than all the crap that was crowding my head, especially something that needed action. Action kept me busy, action kept me from stressing out, action kept my stupid stomach in check. 

I neared Kyle and Red with every intention of throwing Kyle’s ID at him and running upstairs to get our stuff, but I realized something was off; both of them were looking across the parking lot towards where the crowd of people had been gathering. Turning, I saw the crowd thinning. Most people had started to move away now that the cops had turned off their lights and gotten the old lady to calm down and leave.

            Most had.

            A certain, familiar blond, however, hadn’t.


	9. Don't Your Freedom Make You Feel So Small

My fingers were gripping a ten-ton weight locked into the form of an ID card. Behind my back the engine of the police car played a foreboding backdrop as Kenny crossed the parking lot towards us. The ticking of the second hand was audible in my head, counting down the hour as Kenny stepped up to us.

The four of us suddenly locked as stationary objects, the silence between us deafening, drowning out the noises behind us.

            Only for a moment, though, and maybe only for me. I could see my hand, the one holding Kyle’s ID, shaking, but I couldn’t feel it. Kyle was looking at Kenny and Kenny was looking at Kyle and I should really be telling everyone to get their stuff together and get out of there but I couldn’t find it in me to interrupt them. Not right then.

            “Red,” I hissed, spinning and grabbing him by the arm. Maybe I grabbed him too hard, I didn’t know, but he shot me a surprised look, and tried to say something. I didn’t give him a chance, instead dragging him behind me as I pocketed Kyle’s ID and headed towards the stairs.

            “Stan, what are you doing?” Red asked finally, dragging me to a stop by the stairs. I glanced back at Kyle and Kenny, but other than shooting an awkward look in our direction, the two didn’t seem very interested in where we were going.

            “We need to go,” I said, pulling at his arm again. Red gave a long suffering sigh and twisted his arm out of my grip with an expertise I hadn’t expected. I tried to grab his arm again, but he backed out of my reach.

            “Go where?” Red asked, raising an eyebrow. He looked highly annoyed.

            “Go. Go back. Get out of here,” I said, trying to decide whether I should try grabbing at him again or not. One hour. No, fifty-five minutes now. I bit my lip and turned and headed up the stairs, taking two at a time. The second-hand in my head was thunder.

            “Stan!” Red sounded really aggravated, but I didn’t turn around. We didn’t have a lot of stuff; let Kyle and Kenny have their moment, maybe they could talk or something. I’d get the things ready and get them packed and then I’d have to interrupt whatever heart-to-heart they were having but that was just fine. That was just fine indeed.

            I turned off the stairs and onto the walkway, heading towards the room. I could hear Red following up the stairs, but I wasn’t slowing down. The room door was locked, and I fumbled through my pockets, trying to get the keys out. They were in my pocket right there but my fingers didn’t want to work properly. I managed to pull them out finally, but by that time Red had caught up to me, and as I tried to pick the right key, he pulled them all out of my hand.

            “What is freaking you out?” Red asked lowly, putting the right key in the lock and turning it. I pushed the door open as soon as he did and headed inside.

            “We have an hour to get out of here,” I said, looking around the room. Where to start? We had duffel bags, and we had things to put in duffel bags. That was a start.

            “What?” Red closed the door. “What are you talking about?”

            I took a deep breath, trying to get my head to stop spinning. Freaking out was not going to help at all right now, no matter how messed up everything was, I was going to have to relax and not let things get to me. Make a plan, go through with it.

First step: pack all the things.

No, scratch that. First step: Explain situation to Red. Second step: Pack all the things.

            “They ran Kyle’s ID and they found his record,” I said, turning to look at Red. “They should’ve filed a report.”

            “They didn’t?” Red asked, surprised, “I thought you…”

            “What?” I asked, distracted. Red looked puzzled.

            “I don’t know.” Red gave me an odd look, “Why didn’t they file a report?”

            “Because I asked them not to?” I answered. Red’s odd looked turned odder, and darker, and I shrugged. “Look, I don’t know. I really don’t know, they should have taken him in and called his parole officer, but they didn’t. Now, we have an hour to get our stuff together and get out of here, because if we don’t, they _will_ file a report and then Kyle…”

            I stopped, and looked at him. Red sighed and motioned towards the room.

            “Let’s get things packed,” Red said, moving towards one of the bedside cabinets. I started getting some of the clothes that had been tossed around the room collected. Red passed me to get some things from the bathroom, and I finished putting clothes into the bag and headed over to Kyle’s laptop to power it down.

            “I don’t know how you do it,” Red muttered as he left the bathroom, and I looked over at him. He’d gotten some things packed into a duffel bag, and was hefting it onto his shoulder.

            “Do what?” I asked, and he shrugged.

            “My phone is charging, grab it when you leave,” He said simply, and turned and headed out. I watched him leave, sick and regretful. All the bits and pieces of my life were spinning and spinning, too fast and in too many different directions. Which one did I grab at first? I couldn’t hold on to them all, could I?

            I shut the laptop and packed it away into its bag. There were some things on Kyle’s bedside cabinet, and I grabbed at them and tossed them into his bag, along with some things I found in the shelves of the cabinet. An address book, a sketchbook? A stray keychain that looked vaguely familiar. Some other random things I didn’t focus on too much. All of it went in the bag and I closed it and tossed it onto the bed alongside the bag of clothes.

            Red’s phone. I looked around the room for it while trying to see if anything else was left. The room was relatively clean – we still had thirty minutes and counting – and Red’s phone was on the windowsill, plugged into the socket. I walked over and unplugged it, wrapping the cord up and then picking up his phone. I was about to tuck it into my pocket when suddenly it vibrated. Why I fumbled and dropped it, I didn’t know, but it clattered to the ground. I winced, picking it up and hoping nothing was damaged. Red never put it in a cover and on a day like we were having right then, of course something bad would happen.

            I looked it over closely, but there weren’t any scratches, thankfully. Just to be sure, I turned the display on to see if everything was in working order. The screen lit up to show a text message notification.

 

M

txt: 8:45pm

 

when u coming back? miss u

 

            I stared at the screen for a moment, breath catching in my throat. M? Who was M? Why was this M texting Red? Why were they missing him?

Why were there over 90 texts from this person from the past week?

            I realized that I was scrolling through Red’s text history, something I hadn’t consciously decided to do. Something I’ve never, ever done. Line after line of texts to and from M filled the history – apparently they’d been texting back and forth throughout this road trip. Every day. Quite a few times a day. I couldn’t focus on what was being written in the texts, or maybe I was just blocking it out, but I forced myself to back out of the history and turn the phone’s display off. This was wrong, I was prying into stuff that wasn’t mine.

            Gritting my teeth, I tucked the phone into my pocket and tossed the charger into one of the bags. Grabbing them both, I headed out, locking the door with the room keys that Red had left in the lock. I headed down to the car and found that Kenny and Kyle had joined Red at it. Red had the trunk open, and I tossed the bags in. Pulling Red’s phone out of my pocket, I handed it over to him without a word and turned towards Kyle and Kenny.

            “You’re leaving?” Kenny asked me. He didn’t look happy. I looked at him, and looked at Kyle. The redhead looked a little green around the gills; I thought he might be getting over the shock of seeing Kenny and starting to think about the situation again.

            “We have to be gone in,” I paused, checking my watch. “Twenty-five minutes.”

            “Why?” Kenny asked, his tone sharp and cutting. He got up the nerve to come see Kyle, and now we were leaving. I ran a hand through my hair and looked at Kyle again.

            “They ran it?” Kyle asked, his voice low. I didn’t reply, just pulled out his ID and handed it over, and he took it as if he was reaching for deadly snake.

            “Yeah,” I watched his reaction. His eyes flicked towards Kenny, then back to me. Was he scared? Was he ashamed? Was he going to back out of this? Maybe he was, and I was about to say it, I was about to explain everything…

            No. Not this time. I turned around and closed the trunk.

            “What are you two talking about?” Kenny asked, suspicious. I saw Kyle shift his stance, I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel Red’s eyes on me as well. I looked back towards Kyle, and he looked at me. He must have read my face well, though, because he looked away again and tucked his ID into his pocket.

            “I… I’m n-not supposed to b-b-be here,” Kyle said finally, giving Kenny a sheepish look. The blonde raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything, and Kyle continued, “I’m not s-supposed to be outside of Colorado.”

            “Why not?” Kenny asked. He was starting to get a bit of a dangerous air around him. I glanced at my watch again – twenty minutes left. I hoped the officers would be late. Hoped their watch ran on the same time as mine.

            “I-I’m on p-p..” Kyle stopped, biting his lip. His eyes flashed. “I’m on p-parole.”

            Kenny stared at him, for a long moment he looked absolutely confused.

            “Parole,” Kenny said, and Kyle nodded. “You’re on parole.”

            Kenny’s voice began to rise towards the end of his last sentence. Kyle looked a little worried, but he stiffened. I knew those looks, I knew those stances.

            “Guys,” I began, reaching out a hand towards them. What was I going to do? When did anything I could do ever help?

            “You’re on fucking parole?” The change in the blonde’s voice and stance was so sudden I could barely catch it. Kenny was livid. Kenny was never livid. Livid wasn’t even a word I thought of on a normal day, but that was the only word that fit Kenny’s state right then. His eyes were dark with anger, his fists were clenched, and I was seriously worried that there was going to be a fight that I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get into the middle of.

            “I-I’m out, ok-kay?” Kyle wasn’t backing down. If Kenny was livid, Kyle was… whatever the highest form of defensive was. And also a bit livid.

            “What were you even _in_ for?” Kenny growled, taking a stalking step towards the redhead.

            “W-what does it m-m-matter to y-you?” Kyle shot back, glaring. Kenny tried to find a reply, but couldn’t. I watched the stalemate anxiously, checking my watch.

            “Guys,” I tried again, but I apparently no longer existed.

            “You know, I wouldn’t ever expect it from you,” Kenny said, shaking his head.

            “S-s-sorry for creep-ping on your t-territory,” Kyle shot back with a sneer.

            Forget about reaching out hands, I jumped between those two so fast I didn’t realize I’d moved, and they apparently didn’t either because I ended up sandwiched between the two. Even so it barely fazed them, and I had to wrestle to get a hold on the two.

            “Calm down!” I said, shoving them apart roughly. “We really don’t have time for this. There’s ten minutes left, do you really want this to be how today ends? You want the cops to come back and see you guys going at it here?”

            Both of them gave me dark looks, and I was sure that if I wasn’t holding them apart they’d go at it again. What had changed in the past two years? Nothing, obviously.

            “Cartman was going around talking shit about Red and me,” I said finally. If no one else was going to be doing the explaining… “And Kyle decided to confront him about it.”

            “With his fists?” Kenny asked dryly. Kyle’s glare was so fiery I could feel the heat on my face.

            “He w-w-wouldn’t listen when I t-talked,” Kyle growled, trying to shove my hand off of his chest. I didn’t let him.

            “Cartman took him to court for assault and he won,” I continued, “Kyle went to jail, got out after five months for good behavior, and that’s it.”

            “That’s it?” Kenny shoved my arm away, and me along with it, so hard I nearly ran into Kyle. “He’s got a fucking record Stan!”

            “Yeah, well it’s his record and it’s his problem, not yours.” I said sharply.

            Kenny stared at me, all anger and helplessness, and Kyle shifted uncomfortably.

            “Look, we seriously have five minutes. I’m not going to assume that those cops were nice enough _not_ to come back around again,” I said, looking at each of them in turn. “This sucks, it really does, but we have to go.”

            I gave them both one final look, then turned around and headed towards the driver’s side. I didn’t care what happened next, I realized. I really, honestly, truly didn’t.

            I had enough of this trip. I had enough of the stress and the wondering and the trying to make things work.

            I just wanted to go home.

            I opened the door and got in the car, pulling the door shut, and put the key in the ignition. Five minutes. I started the car up and put my hands on the steering wheel, trying to breath steady. Five minutes. Four minutes now. I could see my hands shaking on the wheel; that wasn’t a good sign, was it?

For all the anxiety I should have been feeling, I found myself strangely calm, strangely detached. I was in my Civic in Oregon, four minutes away from possibly having to see my (former?) super-best-friend get taken to a police station (again). My boyfriend was texting with someone I didn’t know in a way that made me a bit (ha!) uncomfortable and was acting stranger than he had in a long time. The guy we’d driven through three states to find was just outside the car and we were missing out on time spent with him because of some crazy old lady.

            And all I could feel was a sort of steady calm that seemed as pervasive as the sudden hiss of white-noise in my ears.

            And I realized I couldn’t focus my eyes on anything.

            The doors to the car opened; Red sat in the passenger’s side seat, looking at something on his phone. I could hear Kyle get in back.

            “Y-you didn’t say b-bye to K-K-Kenny,” Kyle muttered. I didn’t answer. For a moment there was nothing but the hum of the car engine, then Kyle spoke again. “We can g-go.”

            I put the car into drive, and looked at the rearview mirror. The reflection was all shapes and colors, and I squinted to make out something, anything. My heart was pounding but I couldn’t catch my breath. Putting faith in instinct, I backed the car out and turned it towards the parking lot exit. There was a figure on the side, a single figure that stood out sharply focused in contrast to the world around it. I looked at him, but his expression was unreadable, and for all the stark contrast he made in my vision, he looked like a ghost.

            I drove past him and onto the street.

            A police car passed us going the other way.

            I told myself not to shake, and drove.


	10. It's Time To Dig Another One

The road stretched into darkness. At some point Red had turned the radio on to drown out the silence, and it crackled fitfully as we drove out of the range of the city’s radio stations and neared those of a neighboring town. The shapes of utility poles passed looming overhead, and the only light was that of the car driving a few dozen feet ahead of us. The clouds overhead turned everything gray and strangely see-through as the moon filtered through them.

            “Stan.”

            I jerked, my hands tightening on the wheel. The glint of moonlight off of the road stripes glittered in my eyesight.

            “Stan, pull over.”

            I realized that it was Red talking. I glanced at him, found him eyeing me strangely, his mouth partially open like he wanted to say something more, his dark eyes made darker by the lack of light. I looked out the windshield, looked ahead, but found that the car that had been driving in front of us had disappeared. I shuddered, shaken, and brought the car over to the side of the road.

            “We’re switching,” Red said, but I was finding it hard to recognize his voice. I was finding it hard to take my hands of off the wheel. I heard a car door open, and found that Red had stepped out already. I couldn’t hear Kyle in the backseat. Maybe he was sleeping.

            Peeling my fingers from the steering wheel, I unlocked my door and opened it. Stepping outside I was hit by the cold night air like a slap in the face. My mind reeled a moment, and I shuddered and shook my head. The clouds hung low, I felt stifled.

            I dragged fingers through my hair and stumbled around to the front of the car, only to be stopped by a hand on my chest.

            “Hey.”

            It was Red. Of course it was Red. His voice was soft.

            I looked towards him but not at him. He kept his hand on my chest.

            “It’s going to be okay, Stan,” He said.

            “Yeah.” I nodded.

            I slipped past him and walked around to the passenger side door and sat down in the car. The seat was still warm. I closed the door, and pulled the seatbelt on as Red got in on the driver’s side.

            I closed my eyes. The seat was warm, but I was cold.

 

*

 

            The diner at the truck stop was surprisingly well-kept. The food seemed to be decent, but my stomach disagreed. It disagreed violently. The patch of dirt behind the diner I was staring at looked like it had seen more than one episode of stomach upset. I grimaced and spit to try to get the bitter taste out of my mouth.

The sun had risen a while ago but I couldn't seem to get awake. Everything around me was distant, almost too far for me to reach. I stumbled a little as I walked back to the diner's front door, wondering how I ever managed to deal with stress. Had I ever been able to deal with stress? Dry leaves and a cold night.

I shuddered, and nearly missed my phone’s vibration. A call, really? I answered without looking at the display, too tired to think of who might be calling.

“Hello?” I put my hand on the door handle and started to pull.

“Where the hell are you?”

I froze, the door partially open, at the voice on the phone. The sudden surge of hot blood in my veins was a stark contrast to the sudden chill that ran down my spine. I closed the door and turned away, heading back to the side of the diner.

“What do you want, Cartman?” I growled.

“What do Ah want?” Cartman sounded half annoyed, half amused. Of course. “Ah want to know where the hell you are. Ah didn’t come all the way back from Germany to get stranded at your door, fag.”

“You’re at my apartment?” I asked, confused and surprised.

“No, Ah’m at the fucking Shitty Wok with a carton of orange chicken _of course Ah’m at your apartment_ ,” Cartman spat.

I frowned, and ran a hand through my hair, scuffing my shoes in the dirt as I tried to make some kind of sense of the situation.

“Why the hell are you at my apartment?” I asked finally.

“Wha- Ah’m back from Germany you douche!” Carmant practically screamed. I winced.

“And you don’t have anywhere else to go?” I closed my eyes and covered them with my hand.

“Ah wanted to just say hi to an old friend, is that so wrong?" Cartman's voice was sickeningly sweet, I wanted to gag.

"Why the fuck would I want to see your fat ass?" I snapped, "I fucking hate you, you bastard."

"Oh Stanley, Ah think 'hate' is too strong a word," Cartman oozed. I gritted my teeth.

"I don't think it is, not after everything you did." I growled. "Now get the Hell away from my apartment."

"And Ah thought we could sit down, talk like friends," Cartman sighed. He had to be taking acting classes. "Ah even got you a cuckoo clock. Guess Ah'll have to give it to someone else."

I was about to tell him just what he could do with that cuckoo clock when he gasped.

"Ah know, Ah’ll just take this clock to a couple Ah’m sure will appreciate it,” Cartman said gleefully. I could practically see the smirk on his face. Realization sparked through my mind, smouldering in my brain.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_...” I threatened, and he chuckled. I could practically see the smirk on his face.

“Oh, Ah think Ah will,” He answered, “And Ah think they’ll be very _in-ter-ested_ to hear all about how you took your boytoy on a pleasant little trip into the country without telling them...”

            “Fucking _bastard_!” If I could have reached through the phone to throttle him, I would have.

            “Have fun, Stan,” Cartman’s voice was all victorious sneer. I couldn’t remember what I shouted at the phone, long after he’d hung up, but it couldn’t have been good. A couple of truckers coming out of the diner had given me odd looks with raised eyebrows, and a wide berth as they walked over to their trucks.

            Fucking _asshole_. I shoved my phone into my pocket and stalked back over to the Civic. I couldn’t deal with the diner, couldn’t deal with the people inside. Reaching the car, I remembered that Red had the keys. Letting out an exasperated grunt I kicked at the wheel a few times and tried to walk off the seething rush running through my veins.

            What the hell was Cartman doing in South Park? Checking up on his little pet project, _Fuck Up Stan’s Life_? And gloating about it, no doubt. I hoped he was still in South Park when I got home, so I could drive down there and _repay_ him for all his efforts. Yeah.

            With a sigh, I sat back on the hood of the Civic and decided to wait for Red and Kyle to get back. My stomach felt like it was on fire. I wrapped my arms around myself. I didn’t want to be here anymore.

            “Hey.”

            I jerked a little, frowning as I looked up. Kyle stood a few feet away from me, glancing around uneasily. He gave me a shaky grin, and I sighed.

            “Hey,” I said. For a moment we just sort of looked at each other without looking at each other, then Kyle half-sidled, half-walked up to the car and slid onto the hood next to me.

            “S-sorry,” Kyle muttered, barely loud enough for me to hear. I shrugged, looking up into the cloudy sky.

            “For what?” I asked, still not looking at him.

            “Everyth-thing.” Kyle answered. I felt him shift, thought I could feel him looking at me.

            “It’s not like we thought it would be, is it?” I said, and looked at him. He gave me a tired smile.

            “Nothing e-ever is, I g-g-guess,” Kyle tapped his fingers against the car hood. I could feel the delicate reverberations. For a moment longer we sat there quietly, the gurgling of an idling diesel engine playing background noise.

            “I meant a-about everything, th-though,” Kyle started. I managed a grin.

            “We had this talk already,” I cut in, giving him an amused look. He laughed, a short laugh, and shook his head.

            “Just... M-maybe going on t-t-this trip wasn’t such a g-good idea,” Kyle looked subdued, looking down at the ground as he rubbed his left forearm with his right hand. “Maybe t-things would have b-been different...”

            Oh. I thought I could see where this was going. Kyle wasn’t an idiot, after all, and even an idiot could feel the growing tension between Red and me on this trip. Hell, I could feel it, and I was trying to avoid feeling it.

            “It would probably have happened anyways, Kyle,” I said carefully. “And this trip’s... jolted me. Back to reality. Made me realize things.”

            “G-good things?” Kyle asked with a hopeful look. I thought about it for a moment.

            “That depends what happens next, I guess,” I answered honestly. Kyle didn’t look happy with that answer, but I doubted there was an answer that I could truthfully give that would have made him happy. Everything in my head was still shifting, still turning and tumbling, but I was starting to see a design to it. Starting to see where the pieces all fit.

            I thought, for a moment, on whether to tell Kyle that Cartman had called. Would it be worth it? No. I wouldn’t do that to him. For all I knew, Cartman would be long gone by the time we got back. Actually, knowing him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was.

            “Was a memo sent out about sitting-on-car-hoods-time? Because I might be a little bitter if one was and I didn’t receive it.”

            I looked over to see Red approaching us, face a perfect mask of unconcerned boredom. Or was it a mask? I held my hand out wordlessly, still musing on that, and just as wordlessly and without even a flicker in his eyes Red tossed the car keys over to me and headed over to the passenger side door. Kyle shifted uncomfortably on the hood next to me. I didn’t look at him, but slid off the hood and got the car doors open. Kyle followed me off the hood a moment later.

I pulled the door open and got into the car, starting it up as the others got in. Red was looking at his phone (of course of course) and his impassive mask had lifted a little, a slight grin on his face. I looked at him once, looked away, looked back.

“Good text?” I asked, looking away and at the road ahead. My hands twitched on the

wheel.

“Yeah,” He responded tonelessly. I looked at him. His grin was gone.

I relaxed my gritted teeth and told myself to breath.

To look out the window.

To look at the miles and miles of highway stretched ahead of us, all leading us home.

 

*

            Homecoming is a strange experience, when the home you return to isn’t quite the same as the one you left behind. It wasn’t anything tangible that changed, nothing was moved or put back in the wrong place. The air was just different, the breathing of the walls. Me and Red passed each other as ghosts, with the ghosts of a touch at our fingers and the ghosts of smiles on our faces.

Maybe the change was intangible because we were as well.

A week’s worth of breathing stale air in staler rooms was starting to get to me. I kept approaching the problem without dealing with it, beginning to speak without saying anything, stopping before words could start spewing out of stiff lips. And Red, Red would pause and look, eyebrows slightly raised, lips parted just a sliver, finger frozen in turning a page, poised to take a step, cup half-raised, waiting, _waiting_. And like an ill-formed storm my resolve blew out without a fight, dispelled by self-doubts and fears and the wind and the cold and the dry leaves.

Maybe it would be different soon, maybe I’d finally get the nerve and keep it. Maybe that moment was now, even. Rob had let me out of work early; maybe he’d noticed my general lack of concentration. Whatever it was, half past two I was parking the Civic on a side street next to our apartment building and walking down the sidewalk to the corner. The day was clear and sunny but I couldn’t shake the chill at the my back.

The walk to the apartment almost seemed to take longer than it should. My thoughts were pooling in stagnant whirlpool in my head, and I was having a hard time focusing on anything outside my narrow line of vision. A dark shadow was approaching from ahead of me as I came closer to the building. I wouldn’t have paid attention to it, except for a glint of light that caught my eye. I looked over as we neared to pass, more a reflex than anything else, and caught sight of another guy, dressed in black and spike-studded leather. He had dark sunglasses on so I couldn’t see his eyes, but as we passed his head tilted towards me slightly, and a I thought I saw a dark smirk spread across his face.

Something tickled, at the back of my mind. Something pricked. Something tore. I slowed as I took a few steps more, paused to look back. The guy was nearing the corner, tilting his head as he put a cigarette to his lips, but I could see him better now. Black. Gothy. Green-tipped hair.

I spun around, biting my lips. Without a second thought I hurried to the door, pulling it open and pulling out my keys. Unlocked the second door, didn’t wait for it to close before starting up the stairs. Up the flights. To the apartment door. Was my breath coming fast because of the run up the stairs or because...? My hand shook as I put the key in the door, turned it in the lock and pushed it open and nearly fell inside.

Silence. Then not quite silence. I walked out of the entryway and into the living room and Red was frozen with one hand in his hair, as if I’d caught him in the moment he was running his fingers through it to try and tame the disheveled mess. His eyes widened when he saw me, lips parted. He didn’t move. I didn’t move. His shirt was rumpled, pulled up on one side to reveal a strip of pale skin above the line of his jeans that had been pulled low over his hips. The fly was open.

Was I breathing still? I looked him in the eyes. The fingers of the hand he hand tangled in his hair were clenched, his face was pale. I wanted to say something, but apparently I really wasn’t breathing anymore.

I turned around.

I walked out.


	11. End Is The Only Part Of The Word

The sky was dark when I opened my eyes. The glare of the streetlight above lit the car dash in an eerie yellow. Moving for the first time in hours - when had I fallen asleep? - I winced at the stab of pain that shot through my cramped back muscles.

            Seven o’clock. I rubbed my eyes, ran my hands through my hair. Outside the window I could still make out the wrought iron fence that ran all the way around South Park Town Cemetery. And beyond it, inside? Snuffed candles and dead flowers and forgotten slabs of stone.

            I bit my lip, tearing my eyes away from the cold black metal bars. The road was empty. I reached out, turned the key in the ignition. The Civic started without a hitch, the engine idling as I took a deep breath, brushed fingers over my eyes. If I could stop thinking, just a moment, just a second, that would be great. That would be wonderful.

            I turned the radio on.

            _Don’t you miss your family and your friends?_

_Don’t it feel like this road_

_Never ends-_

            Grimacing, I switched the station -

            _Hold me like before_

_Hold me like you used to-_

            I turned the radio off again.

            Biting my lip, I gripped the steering wheel and looked out at the dark sky and foggy moon and did not think.

After a moment I put the car into drive. Pulled out onto the street. The road was still empty, and I drove for a long time in silence and in near darkness. There wasn’t much in the way of a thought process as I navigated turns. If I knew where I was going, the knowledge was subconscious, repressed. If I didn’t focus on the road, I could continue that slow, steady drive.

So I didn’t. Didn’t focus, didn’t think, but let my head go on auto-pilot as the empty streets turned into slightly busy ones, as parked cars began to dot the sides, as empty brush turned into commercial buildings, and then commercial building turned into apartment houses, and apartment houses into quaint and not-too-small-but-not-too-large cookie-cutter family homes.

            When I stopped the car in front of the unassuming, dark green house, I needed to shake my head and really look around to realize where I was.

            Home.

            Even after turning the car off and staring at that dark green siding I could hardly believe I was there. My hands had a hard time peeling off from the steering wheel, and I had to force myself to force the car door open. The thud of the car door closing seemed to resonate off of the surrounding houses. I shuddered at the sound, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed anything. It was late and it was dark and the street was quiet and empty in that feel-good wholesome family way. Somewhere far away a dog barked, once.

            The walk up the walkway took ages. There were lights on behind the windows but nothing moved beyond the curtains. I stopped at the door, staring at the dark wood and the brass knob as my mind tried to form cohesive thoughts. Should I ring the doorbell? Would Dad have fixed it, finally, after all those years? Or should I knock, like all the family friends did?

            Should I pull out that long-unused key on my keyring and open the door myself?

            Vertigo, suddenly, and a sudden shift of horizon to just shy of 50 degrees vertical. The door was still and silent before me but my heart was suddenly loud and pounding in my ears. Do I go in? Do I have a choice? Should I even be here? I was hit by the sudden urge to run, run, but I couldn’t move my feet and that door might have been a solid barrier before me but it wasn’t an impasse.

            If I couldn’t run _home,_ then where?

            My dilemma was solved by the simple motion of the door opening. A sliver of light from between the door and the door frame widened slowly, the door easing open almost in slow motion as I watched with my heartbeat still thudding in my ears. For a moment I couldn’t focus on the person standing in front of me, the sudden bright light from inside momentarily blinding me.

            My eyes adjusted, and when they did it was to bring the formerly familiar image of my dad into focus. His hair was a bit more gray at the temples, and there were more lines on his face than I had remembered, and he looked at me with a strange, unreadable look in his eyes. He must have been working late; he was still wearing his work shirt, a few buttons undone at the top, and his dark work jeans.

            I swallowed thickly, made an attempt to say something. Say anything.

            And he just stepped back a bit, holding the door open.

            For a moment I wavered on the doorstep, but then I stepped through, past him into the front room. Familiar sights, familiar smells, familiar feelings of _familiarity_ and the raggedy twisting vertigo that was still turning the world around me jolted suddenly, sickeningly in the other direction and nearly knocked me off my feet. I stood awkwardly, taking in just how little the house had changed.

            Sure, there was a new coat of paint on the walls, but it was the same shade of palest-mint-green that it had always been. The pictures on the wall behind the couch were the same, but there was a new one of Shelley with some guy I didn’t recognize. And what _was_ going on in her life? Another person I barely knew now.

            “What’s up?”

            I almost didn’t recognize my dad’s voice, it had been so long. I spun around to see him standing not far from the door, hands held awkwardly at his sides. I shrugged and tried not to lose grip of my surroundings. I couldn’t help feeling like I didn’t belong there, like this was some strange, far off, distant land I was encroaching  on even though this was home, home, _home_.

            “Uh...” I realized that a shrug was probably not much of an answer, and cleared my throat, “Nothing. Nothing much. How... you? How are you doing?”

“All right...” My dad said, nodding absently. Awkward silence for a moment again, and then he was motioning to the kitchen. “Wanna beer?”

“Uh...” I struggled with my reply; aw, fuck it. “Sure.”

I followed my dad as he walked over into the kitchen, looking around. Everything was like I remembered it, everything. Like nothing ever changed.

Pulling the fridge door open, my dad pulled out a couple of cans of beer and handed one to me. I opened my can, feeling a slight twinge of guilt. What did it matter anymore, anyways? I took a drink, trying not to grimace at the now-strange taste of hops. Still, it went down smooth, and I took another drink to get used to the taste, and then one more, and then I stopped because I realized that I was thinking of chugging the entire can and that could just not end well.

“Wanna watch the game?” My dad said, and I nodded and followed him back to the living room. He took his usual seat at one end of the couch, and I lowered myself onto the other end. The beer can was cold and sweating beads of water. I stared at the TV but I couldn’t pay attention. I was home, home, watching TV with my dad as if the past two years hadn’t happened.

But they had, hadn’t they? And today happened too. And now I was back at the beginning and I couldn’t see where I could go from here. Was there anywhere to go? Should I just give up now while I was still sort of ahead? I tried to focus on the game, and on the beer, and on anything other than the gigantic and overwhelming possibility that I might have made the wrong choices and I might have been making the wrong choices all along and that I’d run myself into a corner and dug myself into a hole and that any move I could make would send it all crashing down around me.

“Did something happen?”

I jolted back to reality with my hands clenching the beer can so tightly it had crushed inwards a little at the sides. It was mostly empty, and my head was swimming slightly. After a year of living alcohol free it apparently couldn’t deal with the sudden excess.

“What?” I looked at my dad.

“Did something happen?” He repeated, giving me a concerned look. I shrugged.

“No,” I shot back. “Maybe. So what?”

Snark snark snark. Maybe I should have passed on the beer. I started rolling the crushed can between my palms, feeling the can crinkle between them, feeling the liquid inside slosh around. I bit my tongue and tried to keep myself from talking more; alcohol was a bitch.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You don’t want to hear it!” I barked back. So much for biting my tongue. I stared down at the crushed can in my hands. I wanted to be angry, but I just felt hurt, like I’d been running into walls each time I took a corner and ended up bruised by each decision I’d made and I guessed that with all the running and the hiding I’ve been doing for so long all I had to show for it was the bruises and the detachment and the general soreness that was creeping across my body with the help of tongue-loosing alcohol.

“Stan,” Dad’s voice was calmer than I expected it to be, but I couldn’t look at him. “I know you don’t trust me and you’ve got good reason not to.”

I bit my lower lip to keep it from shaking but it wasn’t working to well. I wanted to chug the rest of the beer but the can was too crushed and my hands were starting to shake so it’d probably end up all over me instead of in me. I was feeling a lot like that crushed can with all my feelings just sloshing around as I got twisted and turned around by... by... by what? Life? The World? _Myself?_

“I had a lot of time to think, you know,” Dad kept talking, like he couldn’t see I was having a breakdown here and needed some time to compose myself. “I thought about you, and I thought about your mom and Shelley, but what I was thinking about really was how angry I was. You know? I was just _angry,_ like some crazy bull seeing red angry, for a long time.”

Yeah, this was making me feel a whole lot better. I detached a hand from the beer can and rubbed my fingers over my eyes.

“Then one day, I was getting groceries for your mom because she forgot something, and I heard these people I barely recognized talking, and they were talking about you,” Dad continued, “I mean, they didn’t say your name or anything, but I knew it was about you because... well, you know, but anyway, what they were saying... it wasn’t very _nice,_ and I was listening to them and I got mad again. Just so _mad_. How could they be saying anything about you? They didn’t even know you! And I told them off, right in the store. And I stormed out of there and got in my car and then it was like, I don’t know, someone turned on a light, and I saw that scene in the store again, only instead of them it was me, and instead of me it was you...”

The hand I’d rubbed across my eyes was clamped over my mouth, now, and I could barely hold the beer can in the other one.

“I just realized how stupid I was. I didn’t even let you explain, and I didn’t listen or anything. I just... couldn’t understand, so I got mad, and I took it out on you. That wasn’t fair,” Dad’s voice got a little thin, and he cleared his throat as I tried to keep myself trapped secure behind the hand I had pressed against my mouth. “I realized that just because... just because you’re gay doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.... but... but if I’m angry with you because of it, then maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

I took the hand off my mouth and bit down on my tongue, and I looked at my Dad, and he looked at me, and he tried to give me a smile but it came out lopsided like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be smiling right then and I couldn’t do it anymore everything just came bubbling up and out of me in a staccato of sobs and I couldn’t stop them and my Dad was patting me on the shoulder and for some stupid and insane and ridiculous reason I felt horribly embarrassed by the whole situation and I just wanted to go crawl under something and not come out for days.

“I kept thinking I should call you...” Dad’s voice shook a little as he shifted over on the couch closer to me.

“W-why didn’t you?” I wiped my hand across my eyes, trying to control my breathing.

“I thought you hated me,” Dad responded.

“I thought you hated _me_ ,” I choked out.

“I can’t hate you, Stan,” Dad said, trying that grin again. “You’re my son.”

I probably should have been at least a little ashamed by just how badly I broke down right then but in all honestly I couldn’t care less. All this dirty, dirty smokey bad shit that had been sitting deep down in me was coming up and coming out in sobs and tears and everything that had gone bad that day and the days and weeks and months before was just shoving its way out of me and away from me and I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. And my Dad put an arm around my shoulders, all awkward and warm, and just started spouting all these things about how things were all right and how everything was going to get better and how nothing was wrong and all sorts of things I just really, really needed to hear and somehow I managed not to drown on the tears or choke on the sobs and by the time my Mom was opening the door to the house I wasn’t sobbing anymore and I’d managed to wipe the tears off of my face.

“Stan?” She said, and she looked at me with her face turning bright, like she’d just seen the sun for the first time in years and years, and she dropped the bag she was carrying and almost ran across the room and threw her arms around my neck and all the hard work I put into composing myself was shot down the drain just like that.

 

*

 

The walls were still deep indigo, and the corkboard over the desk was still cluttered with high school photos and random scraps of paper. The ceiling still had the crooked glow-star constellations from fifth grade and the ceiling fan was still stuck on clockwise. The closets were mostly empty but the mattress was the same, and I was laying in the half-twisted position that avoided the big hole in the left center of it as I watched the sunlight creep up the wall across from the window.

I could barely remember the night before; after a seriously embarrassing, tear filled reunion all I could remember was having more beers with my Dad and then maybe something about staying the night. Of course I had to mention staying the night, why else would I wake up in my old room with the peeling ACDC poster and the desk drawer full of Coke bottle caps?

I needed to go. I _knew_ I needed to go.

I didn’t know what time it was but it was at least a half-hour drive back to the apartment, and I had to take a shower and get changed and go to work.

I had to go back.

I grimaced, ran my hands over my face and through my hair. My temples were pounding and my tongue tasted like someone had run a cement truck over it and then spilled some gravel on it for good measure.

I didn’t want to do _anything._

I could always call in sick. Then I wouldn’t need to go back to the apartment, not right away. I could bum around here and pretend I had a day off. I could just put off the whole thing until...

Until when?

_For how long?_

I rolled over with a groan, falling into the hole on the left center of the mattress and tried to think of a way to get out of it, get out of everything, get away from all these _decisions_ just for once.

A knock on the door didn’t give me the chance. I groaned loudly in response, and heard it open.

“Stan, honey?” My mom. Dear mom. Wonderful mom. “It’s seven, I was going to let you sleep in but then I realized you probably have to get to work, don’t you?”  
            Work. Yes. Work.

            I picked my head up just enough to look at her over the top of my pillow.

            “Mom?” I croaked, my throat dry enough that it came out more like “Mah”.

            “Yes sweetie?” Mom grinned at me, softly and motherly. Such a nice mom.

I wanted to ask her a lot of things. I wanted to tell her a lot of things. I just wanted to say something, find out something, hear something that would help me figure it all out.

“Did… did you and Dad ever have… you know, problems?” I muttered, trying to sound intelligible. Mom just gave me a look, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow, like I should have know better than to ask a stupid question like that.

“Okay,” I sighed, “Yeah, but how did you deal with it?”

“Well,” Mom said, and she walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge. “Usually, after your father and I had presented our opinions to each other –“ What a nice way of putting it “- we’d take the time to settle down, and then we’d talk it out.”

“Talk?” I looked at her, and she nodded. “You _talked_?”

“Is that surprising?” Mom asked, a slight grin on her face. I shrugged.

“Just seems… so, I dunno…” I frowned.

“Simple?” Mom chuckled.

“Yeah…” I stared at a stray thread poking out of the pillowcase. “What about when you separated that one time?”

Mom’s turn to sigh then, and she patted me on the back.

“That was one time where we didn’t leave time for settling down,” She answered matter-of-factly. I waited to see if she said more.

“ ‘s that it?” I couldn’t see what I’d gotten out of that conversation.

“Yes, that’s it.” Mom said. Then she gave me that knowing-mother kind of look. “Rough patch?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, trying not to wince.

“Do you want to talk about it?” She asked gently.

“Not really,” I shook my head, and she patted me on the back again. For a long moment I just lay there and she just looked at me.

“Talk to him, Stan. Communication is so important,” She looked me in the eyes. “You need to talk with each other to know what’s going on, otherwise you lose contact, you lose connection.”

I nodded, not looking back at her.

“I’ll be down in a bit,” I muttered, and she gave me one last pat on the back before leaving, closing the door behind her.

I stared at that stray pillowcase thread, stared hard, and tried to think of what she’d said. She was right, of course. I knew that. I’d known that before I’d asked her, just like I knew, more or less, what her answer would be. Talking. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted everything to go back to how it was, couldn’t it just reset to the day before tomorrow? No, not that, that would mean everything would happen again – then couldn’t it fast forward past the talking and back into normal?

Of course it couldn’t. Of course, talking was the only way. Of course, if we didn’t talk I’d make the same mistakes that I’d be making and the same stuff would happen over and over until we just wouldn’t be able to deal with ourselves anymore and it would all just end so so so badly and I didn’t want to think of that option because as much as I dreaded going back and _talking_ the prospect of an even grimmer future fucking terrified me. I couldn’t see far into our joined future right then but thinking of a future where we _weren’t_ together made my pulse beat just a little faster and my breath not want to come out right.

The sunlight shifted. I dragged myself out of the bed and out of the room, into the bathroom and then down the stairs to the kitchen. Food wouldn’t be my friend, and my telepathic mom knew that, opting to give me a strong cup of coffee instead. My dad came into the kitchen not long after me, patting me on the back as he passed and asking my mom if she’d seen his pants. Everything seemed so normal and so calm but I could feel the twisting in my gut, just a ghost of it, like the first wisp of clouds before a storm. I drank the coffee black, chugged it and hoped the caffeine would do something to get me back to steady. Whether it did or didn’t I couldn’t tell; the vertigo from last night was back, shifting everything like a funhouse and making my legs go weak. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to ignore it, held on to the mug in my hand like it was an anchor.

I drained the last bit of coffee from the mug and set it on the counter. The sun outside was bright, warm, inviting, and somewhere outside, not too far from us, a dog barked. My mom and dad were laughing over something by the stove and I thought about what they’d been through, all these years, and how many times it must have seemed dark and scary and how many times they’d had to just keep pushing themselves through it to find out what was waiting for them on the other side.

I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but I wouldn’t find out sitting and waiting and being too scared to go out there and see.

 

It was time to go home.


	12. Can't Light No More Of Your Darkness

_Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,_

_Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest,_

_‘Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath-_

_All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath._

_Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,_

_Or weep as I could once have wept, o’er many a vanished scene;_

_AS springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,_

_So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me._

_~ Lord Byron "Stanzas for Music"_

* * *

 

 

Doors had never seemed so ominous before. I expected a creak as I pushed it open, but was greeted by weighted silence instead. Closing the door behind me, I walked slowly, warily into the apartment, feeling like a thief, a trespasser, like I was crossing into unknown territory, a world that wasn’t mine anymore. Everything was alien in its familiarity.

I passed the living room with slow steps, realizing suddenly that the apartment wasn’t as empty as I had thought. It might have been the scent of coffee in the air, or it might have been something not so obvious; nothing I could place, but just an overall… _something_. As I neared the short hallway that led to the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom the smell of coffee grew stronger, and the _presence_ in the apartment became more tangible.

I stopped just outside the entrance to the kitchen area. The kitchen light was on, but dimmed, and the blinds were closed on the small window above the sink. Red stood leaning back against the counter in front of the coffee maker, staring into the untouched cup of coffee in his hands. Did he not hear the door? Or hear me walking across the apartment floor?

He looked ready for work; black jeans and a dark gray short-sleeved button-up and his ankh collar. Oh. His ankh collar. No simple choker today, but the collar with the widest band instead. The keys I still held dug into my palm as my hands clenched, as I could imagine just why he had chosen that today. Couldn’t have anyone asking questions, no, not questions that he didn’t want to answer. I could feel my blood, sluggish with alcohol and a night full of sleep but no rest, start heating, could feel it start to burn. I was trying very hard not to think about the day before but my mind wouldn’t cooperate, and suddenly my head was filled with bad things, very bad things, dangerous imaginings that I’d never thought of while sober.

It took a moment for me to realize just how far I’d gotten – _and it was pretty far and it didn’t end well and if I hadn’t discovered my black-out-drunken self I might have been surprised by the violence_ – and then another moment to realize that I was glaring at Red, and a moment longer before I’d realized that he’d finally noticed me, dark eyes fixed on my face, the hands holding his coffee mug gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white. He fidgeted, just barely, and shrank against the inner corner where the two perpendicular pieces of the counter met. I couldn’t see it but I could imagine the faint tremor running through him. He could take me, he’d done it before, _but he wouldn’t this time_ , there was no defense in his posture, no fight in him, and worse, a sort of resignation in his eyes that sent me a step back. I didn’t like that look on him, I’d seen it once before and I swore I’d never make him look like that again and fuck it. Fuck it.

I turned away, stalked off towards the bedroom. Ten million threads all tying us together and they were starting to strangle. Too many poisonous threads that we’d never cut and too few healthy ones that were starting to fray. He was in the wrong. I was in the wrong. There was so much that was in the wrong.

I rubbed my aching temples, opened the bedroom door and shoved it closed behind me. We were both wrong, both wrong, but he was wronger this time, and all the wrongness I’d stacked up during the years was it really worth such a large return? I peeled my shirt off and tossed it into the corner of the room, walked over to the closet and opened the door roughly. Grabbing my work shirt I closed the door again just as roughly and debated showering. Ah hell, I didn’t stink. I pulled the shirt on and looked my pants over; they were fine. I didn’t have much time, anyways. I looked around the room, trying to focus on the things that mattered just then; vaguely I could see that the bed had barely been touched since last morning, except for a couple of chokers and a shirt that Red had apparently decided against that morning. The alarm clock on my side of the bed flashed eight fifteen as the minutes changed. I rubbed my eyes and left the bedroom, headed to the bathroom to brush the stale taste of hops and coffee out of my mouth and try to tame my hair.

I left the bathroom and headed back through the hallway, patting my pockets to be sure my phone and keys were there. I considered grabbing something from the kitchen, but that would mean g _oing into_ _the kitchen_ and also putting food in my still-not-quite-cooperative stomach and those were two things I wasn’t very keen on. Instead I gritted my teeth, avoided looking into the kitchen as I passed it, and headed out the door, leaving that weighted silence behind.

 

*

 

A full day at work, made more draining by how hard I was trying to pretend that everything was fine and dandy and I wasn’t about to break down from a mixture of mental strain and the lingering after-effects of a hang-over. Drinking myself stupid after over a year of sobriety wasn’t the smartest thing  I could have done, but when had I ever done anything smart? I grinned, too cheerfully, at the little old lady from down the street as I accepted her payment for the package to Boise and tried not to think about how Red was at work today, tried not to wonder if _he_ was there too, starting something, doing something. I handed the little old lady her receipt and assured her that her package will make it within three-to-five days, waving to her as she walked away and as I remembered how pissed Red had been that one day, practically spitting fire as he complained about the vamp-goth. Fuck. I should have known, an over-reaction like that. _I should have known_. How long? How long how long how long?

The door opened again, a pleasant looking older man came in carrying a bag full of shipping tubes. It was old-person day, apparently. I grinned at him absently and tried to keep thoughts of decapitating _Mike-Fucking-Makowski_ in the back of my mind. I weighed tubes and stickered them, going through the motions as thoughts fired sickeningly through my head. Why didn’t I see it before? Was I so out of the loop with what went on with us? Was I that blind? Red told me once I was too honest sometimes, and I thought everyone else was honest too, but that was a lie. I hadn’t been honest in a very long time. In such a long time. There was a severe lack of honesty in anything I did, and maybe that was it; the closer someone got to me, the more they saw, and Red was so close that he finally saw just how fake and dishonest I was, with everything. I was a fucking failure, such a fucking failure. Maybe I deserved it, then, maybe that’s just what I deserved for attaching myself to a fixed point of dishonesty in the past and never moving beyond it.

I handed the man his receipt, laughed almost too loudly at his joke about the weather, gave Rob a grin, and headed back to the bathroom to try and get my head straight before I ended up exploding on someone.

 

*

 

I managed to get through two empty hours of staring at the TV and not seeing it before I picked up my phone and called Ollie.

It wasn’t that simple, actually. I fumbled with the phone a little, then put it back in my pocket, then pulled it back out. Looked at the TV again and tried to ignore the darkness of the apartment. The minutes ticked away as the clock on the wall advanced its hour hand to seven. I shifted on the couch, got up, walked to the kitchen and then walked back. Sat down again. Pulled my phone out for the last time and scrolled down to Ollie’s number and hit the button.

I was expecting it to ring a while, expecting it to go to voicemail. When Ollie answered just as the first ring died I was caught off guard, my voice caught in my throat.

“Hello Stan,” His voice was cool and calm and he sounded like he’d been expecting my call. I cleared my throat.

“Hey,” I licked my lips, eyes flicking to the TV again. “Hey, uh, so… Uh, how was your day?”

“Intriguing,” Ollie answered, as if he couldn’t tell I was mentally flopping around like a fish out of water.

“I’m sure it was…” I ran a hand through my hair. Where to now?

“I’m sorry,” Ollie said into the silence, and I frowned, but he continued. “I believe I may have been a little harsh on… him, today. It wasn’t my intention to make him feel pressured but…”

Ollie’s voice faded into a sigh, and I heard something clicking in the background. No, tapping, at a keyboard; Ollie was off on another writing sprint, then. I bit my lip.

“I just need to talk to him,” I said finally.

“I know.” Ollie said.

“If you hear from him, can you tell him that…” I stopped, sighed, “No, don’t. Don’t tell him, I don’t want him to think I’m being paranoid or something.”

“You’re a good guy, Stan,” Ollie said, with the faintest hint of wistfulness in his voice.

“That’s the problem,” I sighed, “You all think I am, but I don’t think you’re right.”

For a moment there was just quiet, true quiet, even the tapping of computer keys was silenced.

“Just wait,” Ollie said eventually, “He’ll come home.”

“Yeah,” I said, and said goodbye, tossing the phone onto the coffee table. He had to come home, right? Come home. What if this wasn’t home anymore?

I sat back, staring at the TV again. I needed to talk to him, but where to start? What to say? What to ask? I wanted to know, I needed to know, I needed to know everything because otherwise I’d wonder, wonder, and debate, and wonder again, and even though I was trying so hard right then I couldn’t help imagining that he was… he was…

I groaned, rubbing my eyes and trying, trying so hard. I turned the volume up and leaned back against the couch and waited for the hours to pass.

 

*

 

The bedroom door opened near silently. I was just close enough to sleep that I didn’t move at the slight sound, stayed still as he crossed the room slowly, cautiously. A moment of stillness, then I could feel the far side of the bed dip as he sat down on the edge. Another moment, and then I could feel him laying down, moving on the mattress. I tensed, wondering if he was going to try to get closer to me, but he didn’t, and if the pressure on the mattress extended a little across the middle it was just barely.

That was fine. It was fine that he came home past midnight and it was fine that he didn’t want to get closer and it was even fine that just for a moment I felt the ghost of his fingertips on my back.

“You weren’t entirely wrong, I guess,” I said, opening my eyes to look at the night-darkened wall in front of me. Red shifted slightly on the bed behind me, surprised. “I mean, he’s always there, in the back of my mind. He’s not loud, but he’s there.”

I closed my eyes again, squeezed them shut. Whatever, whatever, it was beyond time for this. It was much too long to be carrying this around and I was just so tired of it. Just so tired. Why was he there, in the back of my head, silent and staring and _waiting._

“I didn’t _like_ him,” I said, sighing, “I barely knew him. High school started and shit started to go down with… with Kenny’s family and Kyle and my parents…” _the screaming and the fighting and the yelling_ “…I just didn’t really pay attention to anything. Anything. There was so much shit and I was just trying to survive high school, you know?”

“I…I got on the JV football team, and so did Clyde, and wherever Clyde was, Craig was there too,” My voice wavered on his name; it felt strange on my tongue. “He was just _there_. I… I guess we talked? We must have. And he went to the parties but he spent all his time ignoring everyone and not drinking and just fooling around with his camera. He was always behind the lens…”

I swallowed thickly, “I barely knew him but I guess I knew he was always around, just on the edges... I barely knew him… and then that night… It’s… It’s eleven and I’m just sitting there staring at the computer screen watching a rerun of the Broncos game, and suddenly my phone buzzes. I didn’t even have his number put in so I had no idea who was calling, just a random number calling and calling and I just decided to pick it up…”

I pulled my hand out from under the pillow and pressed it against my eyes, felt the tears on my cheeks that I didn’t even remember shedding. I gritted my teeth, trying to keep the hollow wind and the blowing leaves out of my head, keep the creak of the swings away, keep the… the…

“I never told anyone I picked up.” I choked out, pressing the heel of my hand against my eyes, hard, painfully hard. “Not the police, not my friends, no one. _I picked up_. It would have all been different… But it wasn’t. I picked up. And it was… It was Craig, and he didn’t sound wrong. And he didn’t sound bad. He just asked if I’d meet him at the park, just that. Eleven at night and my parents had just grounded me for driving the car into the mailbox after celebrating finally getting my license with some binge-drinking at Cartman’s, and he asked me to go meet him so I did. I snuck out the back and walked on over. I still don’t know why I did it, I never did figure that out. Just… just something, something maybe in his voice? Or just the fact that _he_ called _me_ , and he’d never called me before. For some reason it all seemed logical then but I can’t figure it out anymore…”

Deep breath. Relax the hand. Don’t rupture your eyes. Ignore the wetness and the saltiness and just breathe. Breathe.

“He was just… sitting on a swing, his camera in his hands. For once he wasn’t looking through the viewfinder, and it was weird to have him looking at me without it as a filter. I sat on a swing next to him, and for a while we didn’t talk or anything. I remember thinking it was boring, and kind of cold even though it was the beginning of summer. Then, just out of nowhere, he started talking. Talking about… about his photography, and his filming. Talking about school and his friends and how they were the only good thing about it. He wanted to be a film-maker, you know? Wanted to make stuff people would want to see, not stupid movies or shows or anything, but real stuff… I don’t know why I was there, I don’t know why I was there to hear it all. It was weird and I didn’t want to be there because it all started edging on personal things, things like his parents never being around for him and his sister and how the only person he liked was Clyde and how it made him feel weird sometimes,” I gnawed my lip, pausing for a moment, “I guess he was trying to figure himself out? I was trying to figure myself out too but I didn’t go calling up people I barely knew in the middle of the night to have a heart-to-heart in an abandoned playground. I don’t know.”

“He looked at me at one moment, and I looked at him and it was… I don’t know. People were always getting us mixed up and I never knew why but I knew why then, looking at him, in the darkness, there was just enough similarities that it was like looking into a really misty mirror. I don’t know. I guess that’s when it changed.” I licked my suddenly dry lips, gripped my pillow to myself tightly. “I guess that’s when I saw it. I guess… he didn’t _like_ me, or maybe he did once but… I… I… didn’t see that, then. I saw longing. He wanted something from me, something… I don’t know. I don’t know what. I can’t forget them… his eyes… it was so … _so_ dark, but his eyes were so _blue_.”

“We were there for a couple of hours, at least. Maybe a little more. Spent some of the time talking about s… stupid shit, like pets… god, we talked about Sparky and Stripe for such a long time, and… I was kind of… happy? I was happy. Shit was still so messed up and…and I was just, having this rough time, and then I just get out there and we’re talking and it’s like nothing matters or anything…” I tried not to sputter my words, tried to keep them coming out of my throat, tried to keep them from sticking in my lungs, crushing them with the pressure of their weight. “And then I had to go, and… and he said he was going to get going too…  and I decided that I was g-going to talk to him… the next day, ask him, you know, _why._ Why.”

_-and never an answer-_

“I was halfway home when my phone started buzzing again… I… I didn’t answer, I was tired, it was like two in the morning, I just… I kept walking…” I tried to keep my voice from shaking, I really did, “But then my phone buzzed again, a short one. Voicemail. I pulled it out and I saw… saw Craig’s number. Again. And something just, I don’t know, something gripped me and I couldn’t breathe. Something about the way he’d been talking…”

“I started walking back to the park. Then I started… started running, but I was far and… and it was like fifteen minutes to get there. I ran so fast but I didn’t get there in time. I didn’t get there in time…” My voice died, I tried to say more but my words were stolen away by memories of a stale wind and crunching leaves and the gently twitching body of a lonely boy hanging from the monkey bars by the strap of his camera.

“I ran home,” I choked out through my tightening throat, “A-and I listened to the v-voicemail and all he said was _I’m sorry_. And I… I listened to it… over… and _over…_ and morning came and then the police came and they asked if I talked to him… and I said no. I _lied_. I lied and I kept lying and I just… I lied to… to all my friends… I lied to Clyde… I… I lied to _you_. I haven’t been honest in such a long time…”

“And you were right… I’ve never been all there for you, not the way I should have been. He’s always in my head, right out of reach, always… I don’t know… maybe I’m crazy, maybe… I just… I don’t like mirrors much anymore…” I shuddered, “But that’s no excuse. There’s no excuse…”

For a moment I could just hear my ragged breathing, feel the tears run down my face. I closed my eyes and I could see deep blue staring back at me. I choked out a sob and buried my face in the pillow and tried to ignore the silence in the room and tried to ignore the boy staring at me from the back of my mind.

 

*

 

When I woke up, Red was gone.

 


	13. Good Living With You

A stiff wind had set the swings creaking on their chains. The bottle was cold and sweaty in my hands, the seat of the swing I sat on pinched at my jeans with its broken edges. The leaves on the ground whirled in a confused sort of spiral.

The bottle in my hand was open but full. The three bottles lined on the ground next to me were open but empty.

I felt somewhere in-between.

Or maybe nowhere at all.

 

 

****

 

"Guten Tag, Stanley. Wie geht's? How's mah favorite fag doing today?"

"I tol' you to stop callin', you fuckin' dick!"

Cartman's laughter grated, poisoning my ears. His voice was the lazy hiss of a serpent, a prying knife digging through my aching skull.

"Oh, is Stanwey in a bad mood today?"

I grimaced. My throat burned, my stomach roiled. The world wouldn't stop spinning above me and under me and on my sides. I tried to form my next words carefully but my tongue resisted and slurred.

"You fuckin' sonova bitch," I rubbed my eyes and tried to see again. "You know what I'm gonna do when I see you?"

"Give meh a faggy kiss?"

"I'll... I'll give you one in the kisser allrigh'." I bit my slurring, traitorous tongue and rolled over, vertigo and nausea pawing at me like an insistent cat. The walls got closer, like they were enjoying watching me writhe in agony.

"You fuck off, jus' fuck the fuck off." I shook my finger in the empty air menacingly. "Jus' fuck off."

"Staaann," Cartman's voice stretched in inquiring chuckling whine, "Have you been getting into the lager?"

"Shuddup."

Cartman tsk-tsked, a short staccato that drilled into my brain.

"Ah'm dissapointed in you." Cartman sighed with gusto, and then went on with disgusting false sincerity. "You were doing so good."

I growled into the phone and ignored the rolling and hitching of my interior organs.

"You were, though." Cartman said almost softly, and added in harsh afterthought, "Fag."

The line clicked off. I threw the phone to the floor and reached for a bottle.

 

****

 

The kitchen light blazed, burning my eyes. I glared at nothing in particular and dumped the bottles I was holding into the overflowing garbage bin. A couple bottles rolled off the top and onto the floor with a clatter that stabbed me between the temples. I eyed them warily for a moment, then with a grimace crouched down and picked them back up. The world swam around me as I shoved them back into the bin, and then pulled the bag up and out. Tying it closed, I walked out of the kitchen and towards the front of the apartment. The bottles clanked as I set the bag on the floor to put on my shoes. The floor tilted sickeningly as I leaned over, and I sat down instead.

I had just managed to get my shoes on when my cell began ringing in the other room. I staggered to my feet and nearly stumbled into the dividing wall, but managed to get to the phone before it stopped ringing. Answering, I stumbled back to where the garbage bag sat waiting.

"'ello?" I muttered, and lifted the bag back in hand.

"Hey Stan."

I sropped, surprised by the voice on the line.

"Kenny?" I leaned in the wall, still holding the bag in one hand.

"Yeah, so, how's it going?" Kenny sounded cheerful. I tried to process the fact that it was Kenny on the phone. I hadn't talked with him since that too-short visit a few weeks earlier, and hearing his voice now was almost surreal.

"It's... It's all right." I stammered over the words. "How 'bout you?"

"It's good too, you know?" Kenny said, and then gave an awkward, almost nervous laugh. "I, uh, actually, I sorta have a favor to ask?"

"Yeah, shoot." I wondered what kind of favor it was, and why the hell he was so nervous. Our last conversation ended on a good note, didn't it? Oh, right, it did, except for that part where I left without saying goodbye. Wow. I was a douche.

"I was wonderin' if maybe you'd be able to drive over to the Central Park bus terminal?" Kenny asked, sounding more cheerful than he should.

"The bus terminal?" I frowned.

"Yeah. The bus for North Park just left and it looks like it wants to rain, and there ain't no way in hell I'm walking an hour in it." Kenny said. I couldn't comprehend his words, and after a pause he continued, "I was gonna call Kyle but I figured if I'm gonna be talking to him I should talk to him face to face, right? And so you're the only other person I can call, right?"

"You're at the bus terminal?" I said, my brain finally catching up to the situation.

"Yeah."

"Okay," I said, shaking my head. "Okay, yeah, I'll pick you up."

"Awesome," Kenny said. "I'll see ya then."

"Yeah, see ya." I hung up and slid the cell into my pocket slowly. Setting the bag back down with another clatter I grabbed my keys from the kitchen counter and headed out.

****

It was raining pretty hard by the time I drove into the bus terminal parking over half an hour later. The poor ol' Civic slid a bit as I hit the brakes, bumping up against the parking block. The last few blocks to the terminal had been a bit difficult to navigate with the blurry surroundings becoming even more muddled by my aching and detached mind.

I rubbed my forehead and winced; there was a pounding just behind it that was growing stronger with each moment. I didn't have much time to wallow in the pain, though. A figure was rushing through the rain towards the car, and I reached over to unlock the doors as Kenny ran up.

"Thanks man," The blonde said cheerfully, grinning as he tossed a large duffel bag onto the back seat and settled into the front seat. I managed to grin at him, but apparently it wasn't a good enough grin, because he was suddenly frowning at me. "Stan, are you drunk?"

"No." I scoffed at the idea. I wouldn't have gotten behind the wheel if I was drunk. Probably.

"You're hungover." Kenny stated. I looked over at him. "Very hungover. All right, get out."

"What?" I frowned at him. He gave me an extremely serious look that had no business being on his face.

"Out. I'm driving."

"You don't know where I live." I protested, but Kenny had already unbuckled my seat belt and was pushing me towards the door. I groaned and pulled myself out of the car and into the rain, cursing as it bulleted against my skull. The thudding in my head grew stronger, and I stumbled a little as I walked around the front of the car.

Thoroughly soaked, we both sat back in the car with roles reversed.

"Point the way, captain," Kenny's cheeriness returned, and I led him through the winding streets back to the apartment, only making a few bad turns. We ran from the car to the apartment building door, and took our time walking up the stairs in a companionable silence.

Kenny was back, I thought. I thought, but I couldn't understand. Kenny was back, and he was standing in my dark apartment dripping puddles onto the hardwood floor and laughing about something random he had said. I laughed too, even though I couldn't remember what we were laughing about, but it felt good.

The atmosphere changed quickly, though. Too quickly. Kenny toed the garbage bag full of beer bottles and gave me a searching look. I went to pull some spare towels out so I wouldn't have to look at him yet.

"Where's Red?" He asked as I handed him a towel. I shrugged, and dragged my own towel over my hair.

            “Stan…”

            I ignored him and headed towards the kitchen, flicking on lights as I went. The storm tossed rain against the windows in a mind-damning staccato that sent the thudding in my head into overdrive. I grimaced as I reached the kitchen, and pulled open the fridge door. I was pulling out a bottle of Coors when suddenly I realized someone was holding my wrist. I looked over to find Kenny giving me a critical look.

            “What?” I said, frowning at him.

            “You sure you should be doing that?” He said, and when I tried to pull my arm away he tightened his grip on my wrist.

            “What’s the problem?” I managed to pull free, bottle still in hand, and closed the fridge door.

            “It’s ten. In the morning.” Kenny gave me an even look.

            “So what?”

            I pushed past him and headed towards the main room. God I was a dick. I was a super asshole douchey dick. I sat down heavily on the couch and reached over to grab the bottle opener off the coffee table. Flicking the cap off with a well-practiced twist of the wrist I tossed the bottle opener back on the table and took a swig of beer.

            Kenny had followed me back to the living room, and I could feel his eyes on me as he wavered a bit in the hallway. He headed over finally, sitting down next to me on the couch.

            “What happened?” He asked, still watching me.

            “Fuck happened.” I avoided his gaze and stared at the brown glint of light coming through the bottle.

            Awkward silence. The pounding in my head getting both worse and distant. Two more swigs and then my head was getting deliciously cloudy again.

            “I was too late,” I said, suddenly, surprising myself. I hadn’t planned on talking.

            “You talked to him?” Kenny said as he continued arranging bottle caps on the coffee table. I watched him work at it.

            “I told him evrythin’,”  I said, “Stuff I didn’t tell you. Stuff I didn’t tell no one.”

            “So why were you too late?” Kenny asked, voice low. He was stacking the bottle caps in a pyramid shape at the edge of the table. I finished off the bottle in one last gulp and set it down on the floor so it wouldn’t mess with his design.

            “’Cause I was too late,” I said, and he turned to me with puzzled eyes. I motioned around the apartment. “Too late.”

            Kenny took a long look around the apartment. It wasn’t like he’d find anything tangible. He wouldn’t be able to feel it, after all, feel that fucking dark hole where a fucking light used to be, a dark deep pit of black everywhere you looked, except it wasn’t visible but like internal because the whole place was one huge fucking mirror reflecting just how dirty and empty you were. I was.

            “So what’re you going to do now?” Kenny asked. He was asking all the wrong questions, or the right ones. No, the ones that he was supposed to be asking, he wasn’t. He was asking other ones and those were the ones I didn’t have answers to. Like that one.

            “Fuck now,” I said, slouching deep back into the couch cushions. Fuck now indeed. What the hell was there to do anyways?

            “Well, what do you _want_ to do?” Kenny eyed me curiously.

            “What do _I_ want to do?” I repeated slowly. Somewhere behind the clouds in my head bits and pieces of some half-formed plans came up, having nothing to do with, but everything to do with, what was going on, both at the same time. There was a hand on my shoulder but it didn’t belong to anyone in the room. There _was_ something I wanted to do, after all. Something that came to me in the dead of night, when a twisting dream of kaleidoscopic views and faint tremors tossed me awake to the meet the invisible blue eyed gaze of a faint memory from too long ago.

Something that wasn’t mine to want, but I wanted it all the same.

           

****

 

            “This isn’t what I came back for, you know?” Kenny muttered as we walked up the long driveway towards the posh house at the end. I ignored him, wiping rain out of my eyes with my sleeve, and after a moment he added, “I should’ve called Kyle.”

            “Yeah you probably should’ve,” I snapped back, tripping my way up the front steps. Kenny stepped up next to me as I rang the doorbell, and I could feel him giving me a dirty look. I continued ignoring him and thought about ringing the doorbell again, and again, and again, but the door opened before I could act.

            “Stan? Kenny?”

            Clyde’s surprise was genuine; I hadn’t seen him since we graduated high school. His face broke into a wide grin, and he pulled us inside and out of the rain. I tried not to step on the plush rug in the, the… the whatever you call the entrance thing of a big house like this, and stood aside as Clyde pulled Kenny into a bear hug.

            “Where’ve you been?” Clyde laughed, slapping the blonde on the back, and Kenny winced slightly before straightening.

            “Around, you know. Oregon, specifically,” Kenny grinned. Clyde laughed, then looked over at me.

            “Hey Stan, it’s been a while,” He clapped my shoulder too, but somehow I managed to keep myself standing. I gave a lopsided grin, but it faded swiftly. We weren’t here for small talk.

            “We got a favor to ask,” I said, running my hand through my damp hair.

            “ _He_ has a favor to ask,” Kenny said pointedly. He glared at me.

            “I have a favor to ask,” I amended. Clyde still looked cheerful. Shame. He wouldn’t look cheerful for long. I licked my lips and cleared my throat. Clyde raised an eyebrow. Kenny looked away. “I need the camera.”

            “What camera?” Clyde asked, looking puzzled. I looked at him as steadily as I could.

            “ _The_ camera.” I said. Clyde’s expression was changing, but he was still holding on to that carefree expression.

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Clyde said. His tone was icy. I ignored it – maybe it was a good thing my brain wasn’t at full function – and met his stony gaze.

            “Craig’s camera.” I said. A visible shudder ran through the large man in front of me. I could feel Kenny’s eyes flicker between me and Clyde, Clyde and me. “I know you have it.”

            “What if I do?” Clyde said, and then, angrily, before I could answer, “And what do you want with it?”

            “The pictures,” I said. Clyde narrowed his eyes. He was still cold. I wiped at my face and waved my hand around vaguely. “He was always taking pictures. Always.”

            Clyde was openly glaring at me now.

            “There has to be something there, on them,” I said. “He wouldn’t just leave without… without leaving something.”

            “And how would you know?” Clyde’s voice was low. I could vaguely see Kenny backing away slightly.

            “I…”

            Well, I shouldn’t. I guess. What was I gonna say? There was no way Clyde accept the truth. There was no way I could explain without the truth. Was I gonna start lying again? Would I have to?

            I winced, raked my fingers through my hair, tried to think of what to say.

            “You lied,” Clyde said suddenly, taking a step towards me. My brain froze a moment.

            “What?” I managed. He gave me a dirty look.

            “You told the police you didn’t talk to him,” Clyde said, “But you did, didn’t you?”  
            My mouth was dry. I licked my lips and tried to find my voice. Clyde was not happy. He was very not happy.

            “I did,” I said, barely getting the words out. My palms felt sweaty, and that familiar twist was starting in my gut. Fuck. Shit.

            “Why didn’t you say something?” Clyde yelled. I took an involuntary step back and bit my lip.

            “Wh…what was I going to say?” I groaned, backing away from his heated glare. I could feel the night again, see the creaking, hear the leaves, taste the darkness. The roiling in my stomach pitched and heaved and it came out spewing words. “What was I going to say, Clyde? That I… I talked to him, and I couldn’t do anything? T-that I was right there and I couldn’t s-see what he was planning?”

            “What do you mean you were right there?” Clyde growled. I barely heard him. My head hurt suddenly. My stomach was acid and sulfur. I couldn’t breathe right.

            “Why did he call me, Clyde? Why’d he ask me to meet him?” I backed up against the wall, my hands on my face. My pleasant cloud of detachment was shattering like too-thin glass. I tried to hold on to my resolve but it was all I could do to keep the wolves off my neck. I twisted my fingers in my hair and could only stammer words but no meaning. “Why me? Why me why me…”

            I fought to breathe, to struggle against the staccato of my heart and the tightening of my lungs. My world was fucking cracks and canyons and deep dark spaces. I should’ve known this was a bad idea. I could stand the park with a beer-clouded head but I couldn’t stand the words and the accusations and what explanation could I have?

            “I don’t know.”  
            Clyde’s voice was quiet, but it broke through the harsh gray clouds in my head. I looked up to see him eyeing me carefully, looked over to find Kenny shocked and confused. I detangled my fingers from my hair, licked my lips slowly.

            “Why do you want the pictures?” Clyde asked carefully.

            “I just… need to know,” I said. Pitiful. “I need to know.”

            Clyde wavered for a moment, but finally nodded towards the inside of the house. He headed down the hallway with heavy steps, and I followed him, hearing Kenny’s footsteps behind me. We walked further on towards an impressive staircase and upstairs. The housed looked bigger than it was, almost too big, almost as if it were growing bigger with each step I took. I worried I was going to lose Clyde in the growing house, unable to keep up with him, unable to move faster as the carpeting stretched on and on beyond my steps.

            Clyde stopped, then, just as I was about to reach out and feel just how far away he was, and he opened a door and motioned for us to follow him inside. The room was large as well, extravagant but not gaudy. I could see the large king sized bed and the flat screen on the far wall across from it but then I could see the desk on the side wall and while everything was hazy and cloudy and distant I could see sitting on the highest shelf above the desk the camera. The Camera. I stopped, suddenly, and Kenny walked into me. He cursed, and walked around me but I could see the glint off the black metal and I couldn’t look away.

            Clyde walked over to the desk, but hesitated.

            “I… I, uh, developed the film,” Clyde said, and cleared his throat. He looked like he was going to reach for the camera, but changed his mind. He reached over to pull open one of the drawers in the desk, and pulled out a large yellow envelope. Turning, he glanced at Kenny, and then turned his gaze to me. I fidgeted, felt my eyes get watery. I didn’t know what was in those pictures but maybe I’d find the answer to that deep dark question and maybe those answers would once and for all shut those blue eyes in the dark and let me sleep.

            Clyde opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of pictures. He looked at them for a moment, then looked at me and held them out. I reached out to take them, my hand shaking. They were glossy finish and shiny and I looked at them and saw that they were all black and white.

            “I don’t know what you think you’ll find,” Clyde muttered, shifting uneasily. “I couldn’t find anything…”

            I nodded, but I didn’t pay much attention to his words. The first picture on the stack was our old high school, a freeze frame of a morning with people heading into the double doors with brass letters gleaming “Joseph F. Thomas” above their heads. It was oddly focused on those letters, the students blurring slightly, as if they were an afterthought. I remembered the building with those shining letters; I remembered the days sitting in stifling rooms with my pencil in one hand and inhaler in the other as dust sifted out of the ceiling panels. Two months into freshmen year the building was demolished due to building code violations.

            The second picture was a view off of the church bell tower looking over the town, the sun setting in the distance behind a screen of puffy clouds. There was a silence in the photo, an eerie detachment. Maybe it was the lack of color, or the vivid contrast of light and dark, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was that caused me such disquiet. The third photo was of Stark’s Pond, surface dotted by ducks, a lone figure with a fishing pole standing at the edge of the pier. The same sense of distance seemed to exist in that photo, and when I turned to the next picture the feeling became almost tangible, choking the air. I sat down on the floor spreading the photos out on the carpet in front of me.

            The fourth photo; five pairs of sneakers on a shoe mat sitting under a coatrack. I don’t know how or why I could tell that the battered pair of dark canvas sneakers on the right of the photo were Craig’s; I couldn’t remember ever paying attention to anything he wore, but somehow I knew. There were other canvas sneakers, there were hi-tops, but these were different. For all that the shoes were grouped on the shoe mat, those sneakers were still set apart, by how miniscule a gap I couldn’t tell, but they were _apart_ and not _a part._

            Pictures are worth a thousand words each but these were entire lifetimes captured on a four by six inch piece of glossy paper. I scattered through the rest of the photos, past grayscale images of parties distanced by blur effects (like looking through a dirty telescope at another life far away from this one), past pictures of eerily serene landscapes waiting for something to awaken, to come back to life among the ink-black branches of dead trees and the glossy eyes of sparrows. Interspersed randomly between shots of nature were pictures of what should have been lively high school moments, a shot of the football team at practice, of honor roll study sessions, of the goth kids smoking behind the school. Every one of them felt empty, lacking. I didn’t know if I was projecting onto the pictures or if I was reading them properly, pulling something out of them that Clyde couldn’t hope to.

            I stopped looking at the pictures. I put my head in my hands.

            “Stan?”

            I ignored Kenny’s voice. I could feel the tears seeping between my fingers as I pressed them against my eyes.

            “ ‘m sorry Clyde,” I muttered. I got to my feet somehow even though I couldn’t feel my legs or my arms or my anything. The photos lay on the floor and I could see them all but nothing helped.

            “…It’s all right,” Clyde said. I shook my head.

            “I’m so sorry,” I didn’t know what I was apologizing for anymore. I couldn’t look at Clyde. I couldn’t look at Kenny. I rubbed my forehead and tried to breathe without shaking.

            “Come on, let’s go,” Kenny said softly. His hand was on my shoulder, but I couldn’t feel it, really. Somehow we made it back to the front of the house. Somehow we were heading back outside.

            “Stan,” Clyde’s voice seemed too far away. I turned to look at him, and he looked okay. He looked okay. I was jealous. “You can come over whenever you want, you know? Don’t be a stranger, man.”

            I nodded, and we walked back to the car, and Kenny drove. The landscape slid by in dreary, washed out color.

            “There’s some people you just can’t save, right?” My voice wavered. My fingers were in my hair but I didn’t know how they got there. The world was washed out and my eyes couldn’t focus on a thing.

            The hum of the engine in the silence between us filled my ears. I rubbed at my temples. Kenny let out a quiet breath. The drizzle outside lightened and the windshield wipers squeaked over half-dry glass.

            “If you’re going to try to save someone, you should focus on the living,” Kenny said, carefully, softly. “You got a chance at succeeding then, at least.”

            I stared out the window some more.

            Breathed out onto the glass of the window.

            Watched it fog up and blot out the world.

 

****

 

            There were three people in the waiting area at the front of the tattoo shop when I walked in. Henrietta was behind the counter; if glares could wound I’d be bleeding on the floor two steps in. Before she could open her mouth I walked through the dividing doorway into the back area. The first partition was curtained off, but I could hear someone moving around in the back.

            I walked back there. The ceiling was high but it felt like it hung just above my head. I didn’t have problems with claustrophobia but maybe no space would have been big enough at that moment. I couldn’t feel the time or the presence or the atmosphere but then I was there and so was Red.

            Pain was a good sign, after all. If you could feel pain you were alive, but if I thought that the pain of being without Red was bad then maybe I wasn’t really living. Seeing him and fully realizing just how close we were to being _apart_ sent a new sort of pain searing through my system, as if I wasn’t really alive until that moment and suddenly my body had remembered that this ‘pain’ thing existed and that it was supposed to do something about it. Heartache is such a cliché concept, but it was either that or a mild heart attack that dug into my chest.

            “I need to talk to you.” I said.

            Red bit his lip. I thought I saw him shaking.

            He looked weak.

            I felt weaker.

            Was this how life went? _When had we ever been strong, anyway?_

            Red looked around, looked helpless, looked lost. The sterilizer was open and he had his gloves on.

            “Come to the apartment.”

            My voice was stronger than it had a right to be.

 _Save the living_.

“I… I get off at six,” Red said, looking at me.

“I know,” I said. He looked torn; I wanted to touch him.

_Save the living._

I turned around, and I walked back outside.

The clouds had parted while I was inside. There was no real sun yet but the rain was gone and color was coming back to the world.

I took a look around, and then I got in the car and asked Kenny to drive me home.


	14. With The Headlights Pointed At The Dawn

Waiting was probably the worst feeling. The anticipation ate away at me. It was only a few hours, but it seemed like I could feel each second as it passed. Kenny had left to go to Kyle's and the silence was deafening.

I tried to keep myself busy. Kenny had helped me get some of the worst trash out, but there was still more left than I had expected. I continued cleaning the apartment, because there were still beer bottles behind the headboard and for some reason in the back of the closet and I really didn't want Red to find any himself. I took the box of Coronas from the fridge, still nearly full, and carried it outside with the rest of the trash. I knew it wasn't going to be easy going cold turkey again, but I'd do it. I had to do it. I wasn't going to disappoint him again.

I realized I was thinking like Red coming home was a sure thing, like it was the most plausible outcome for the day. Time dragged on, and I started worrying whether Red even wanted to come back. Would he even think it was worth it? I told myself he would, because we'd been through too much together, but was that even a good reason anymore... was surviving each other ever a good reason at all?

I knew he loved me, and I loved him, and we could make this work. I reminded myself of that over and over as I waited for him to show. I'd never noticed if I had abandonment issues but I was seriously starting to consider the possibility as my head started pounding worse and my heart felt like it faltered at every beat. The silence was too much.

Six o'clock took too long to come. My head was still pounding and my throat felt raw. I'd drank about eight dozen cups of water but I still felt detached and irritable. I really should've known better than to start drinking again; the anticipation was killing me and I found myself wondering if anyone had taken the bottles of beer I'd set by the garbage out back or if I could still run out and grab some. One. One would be enough.

Six thirty passed and I started wondering if Red would just come in or if he'd knock or what. I paced around the apartment again and sat down again and wondered if I was just over-reacting with all the emotional crap.

I still felt raw inside. I worried that Red thought of me differently. Every now and then my thoughts hinged themselves uncomfortably on flashbacks of windy nights and playgrounds. For some reason I'd thought that telling Red would somehow have fixed everything, but now with the drunken haze lifting and my thoughts clearing I realized the infection ran deeper than that. Even as I tried to focus on the fact that Red was possibly very close now and that I should think of something to say, to explain, anything - the wind and the leaves and the creak of swing chains hovered at the edge of my awareness. It was quickly dawning on me that I was probably in no state to be having a deep and emotional talk with Red about our relationship.

It was stupid how I thought that a drink could get me through it, dull the thoughts enough to let me focus on what was important. I found myself peeking into the fridge, not looking but not exactly not looking either, some part of me hoping I'd forgotten a bottle behind the near empty milk jug.

I pulled myself away from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table. I cleared my throat though it hurt with how raw it felt and tried to take a few deep breaths. It was a good thing I got the bottles and everything out of the apartment when I had. I wasn't sure I would've been able to trust myself at that moment with them. Thoughts kept rolling around in my head, not actual thoughts but the beginnings and endings of thoughts. I felt stupid and sluggish and anxious and irritated all at the same time.

The sound of the door opening surprised me. I froze at them kitchen table, tilted my head a little like that was somehow going to help me hear better. It had to be Red and suddenly I was terrified. Maybe the kitchen wasn't the place to wait for him, I realized suddenly; the last time I actually saw him he'd been in the kitchen and I'd probably been looking a little homicidal. That wasn't a mood to start anything off with, and I stumbled out of my chair and into the hallway.  
Red stood just inside the door, like he wasn't sure if he should be coming inside or not. His expression was sort of unreadable but his eyes glittered oddly, like he was scared or something. He might've been. That was another thing that was all my fault.

I should say something, I thought, though I had no clue what or how to start or what to do and all I ended up doing was blurting out, "You're here," in a surprised sort of way.

"I... I said I'd come." Red replied fidgeting with his keys.

I ran a hand through my hair, suddenly feeling hopelessly lost. How the fuck did I navigate this? I motioned to them living room, "We should sit down, maybe..."

Red looked a little uneasy, and fuck I realized that that was a bad room too, wasn't it, it was the room where I saw... Was there any place in the apartment that wasn't tainted? I led the way in anyways, sat down on one end of the couch. Red had followed behind me, pocketing his keys as he sat down at the other end.

I wiped my palms on my pants and glanced at Red. He was looking down at something at the floor, and I followed his gaze to see a stray beer bottle cap sitting on the edge of the area rug. Fuck. I swallowed thickly and looked away.

"I'm happy you came." I said finally. "I mean, however tonight ends I just...just want you to know I'm happy that..."

I trailed off. How did I end a sentence like that?

"Is it that bad?" Red asked after a moment.

I turned to face him, found him looking at me with that same unreadable expression on his face. I never did find out why he started wearing a mask, why he wore it so well. There were still a lot of things I didn't know about him, and it was making me sad to think I might not find them out.

"I don't know." I said, and I was fully aware that it was the most truthful thing I had said in years. That didn't make me feel any better.

Red looked away then. He had his hands clasped together like he couldn't trust them to be free.

"I'm so sorry Stan." He said, and even if his mask didn't drop his voice cracked with emotion, but then he looked at me and I realized his mask had dropped after all. He looked so tired but most of all he looked sad and a little scared and I could totally understand because I had no idea where we went from here either. He glanced around, gaze shifting helplessly, focusing back on me finally but he still looked lost.

"I don't know what to say." He said. He still had his hnds clenched together.

I looked away then; I didn't know what I wanted to hear from him. What explanation could he give that wouldn't piss me off? Did I even want to hear any?

"Did... Did you... I mean, was it..." I frowned down at my hands. I was trying hard not to think of all the things I wanted to do to fucking Makowski and failing. "You know, before..."

"No." Red said, quick to answer. "That was the only... That was it."

A long silence. I was still frowning at my hands.

"I was going to tell you." Red said quietly.

I looked at him then. He still had his hands clenched together but now he was half leaning over them. His bangs were shrouding his face.

"Were you?" It wasn't that I didn't believe him. Well, maybe a little. Mostly it was because I didn't know what else to say; 'Thanks for the thought.' 'That would've been nice of you.'

"In high school... We... We used to meet up." Red added, even quieter than before. He still wasn't looking at me, and maybe that was a good thing because I thought my expression at the moment might have been a little nasty. Boyfriend? I thought, but something in the way Red had said it gave me a different feeling...

"So he was your Bebe?" I said, and that earned an actual, if dry, chuckle from Red. I leaned back against the couch and Red finally unclenched his hands and pushed his hair back out of his face.

"In all honesty Bebe was probably the better of the two." Red said with a pained half-grin. His face fell again, though.

I bit my lip, my hands fidgeting in my lap. I could still see the bottle cap on the floor; it felt like it was taunting me, exposing all my weaknesses just by existing there in that spot, teetering on the edge of the rug.

I could Red was piling all the blame on himself, again, something that, I'd realized during the trip, had become the usual way of handling tough moments. I'd do something, Red would react, and even if he would be in the right he'd apologize and I'd say it was all right and there we were again back at step one. And of course most of those things that pissed him off had some connection to Craig, and of course he felt shitty afterwards because Craig was dead and he thought I was apparently subconsciously pining after him, so of course he'd apologize.

It wasn't fair before and it wasn't fair now. What Red did was horrible but I hadn't actually been a wonderful person either. Even if I didn't know it I'd been pushing him away, and how horrible must it have been for him to feel like that. Here I was telling him I loved him, then waxing nostalgic over a dead guy and not even bothering to see how it affected him. Even if most of the time I had succeeded in blocking the actual event from myself so totally that I barely realized what I was doing, that was no excuse.

"I'm sorry," I started. The bottle cap still drew my attention and I couldn't help staring at it as I continued, "I'm sorry I... I made you, put you in... In a space like that..."

I didn't know if I worded myself properly. For a moment Red was silent, and then he shifted on the couch, and I knew he was looking at me.

"Stan, it's not-"

"No." I cut him off because I knew how that would go and that wasn't right. It wasn't the right way. "It is my fault in a way. I know you know, and now I... I'm like consciously aware, that I haven't exactly been a good boyfriend."

"That's not true." Red said. I looked at him, was surprised to see he actually looked ticked off, like I'd just insulted his favorite person.

"I don't mean in a... a..." I waved my hands ambiguously. I didn't know what words to use, though, so I just plowed ahead, "I mean, in an emotionally invested sort of way. I should've been there for you, a hundred percent. Been there for us. And... I realize I haven't, and that you've been feeling it all this time. And it's not right. I've always had something else crowding in and, and taking up parts of my head. And I was always sort of distracted in a weird way, and I shouldn't have been."

Red looked at me for a long moment, not angry anymore just sort of sad. His emotions had never been so plainly visible ever before, and I wondered how tired he must've been to not be able to hide them as well as he normally would.

"What you witnessed was a horribly tragic thing, Stan." He said softly. "Of course it was bound to have an effect on you."

"So what?" I said, and ran fingers through my hair, back and forth and back and forth. I was remembering how I broke down at Clyde's and I prayed to whatever gods were listening that I didn't break down again there, in front of Red.

"It doesn't make it right." My voice wavered more than I had expected it to. I swallowed thickly and looked at Red. "I just... I just... What if I'd told someone then? Would…would things've been different? Would I still feel so guilty?"

Red lifted his hand from his lap, moved forward a bit, like a full body twitch in my direction. He caught himself, hand still poised in the air.

"I know you can't answer that. And I can't either..." My voice was really doing a number, I'd probably never sounded so choked up in my life. "I don't know what to do, myself... I don't know how to fix this in my head... I just..."

I buried my face in my hands because I was starting to feel it all creep up on me, the chilly night air and the creaking swings and they just reminded me of how long I'd been fucking up, and it'd been so long. I wanted them out, I wanted them gone, the swings and the leaves and the wind and those blue eyes I wanted them all gone but I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know where to start.

Red's hand was warm on my shoulder. It took a moment for this realization to reach me. I pulled my face out of my hands and looked at him.

"You're going to be okay, Stan." He said with an assuring tone that had always worked to calm me down before. It worked this time too, grounding me, warming me.

"I want us to be okay." I replied, wondering if I sounded like I was whining.

"We will be." Red said with a gentle squeeze on my shoulder. He seemed reassured by the fact I was allowing him to touch me; I guess he thought I might see him as tainted goods after what had happened, but how could I? I loved him so much. What he did hurt so bad but it didn't change the fact that I loved him. So I told him.

"I love you."

"I love you too," Red looked relieved, he looked a little happier, even.

"I want this to work. I don't want to keep making stupid mistakes." I said, shifting so that I sat closer to him.

"We can make this work." Red said firmly. He looked like he believed himself.

I bit my lip again and fidgeted with my hands. Of all the things I had tried to plan ahead of this talk only one thing stuck. It was the most important, I thought, in that it could be the most helpful.

"I don't think we can do it alone." I said slowly. "I think.. I mean, look, I've been thinking about this while...while you were gone, and... I need help. Like actual professional help. I think."

"Like a therapist?" Red asked cautiously.

"Yeah..." I shrugged and wiped a hand across my face for no reason because I wasn't crying or tearing up or anything. "And... Red I think... I mean, if...if you're willing, I guess, I'd...I'd like you to go with me? Not like all the time but sometimes, maybe."

Red's face had grown dark at the mention of the therapist. He seemed to be mulling the thought over.

"We can look into local therapists," Red said finally. He still looked uneasy, guarded

"You don't really like the idea?" I said. Hell, my voice was continuing that wavering thing, and I couldn't make it stop.

"I think... I think it's a good decision." He said slowly, as if he was saying it to himself at the same time he was saying it to me. He had ended up looking somewhere off to the side, but then he turned his eyes back to me and his expression softened. "We'll find someone who knows w+hat they're doing, and I'll go with you, any time you want me to."

His words were genuine. He still looked uneasy but his eyes weren't so scared anymore.  
My hands were trembling and my throat felt like it was trying to close itself off and my stomach was starting to do barrel rolls and I was terrified because when the words were in my head it felt like I was thinking about some story or something but now that I'd said it out loud I realized, this is real life I was talking about. Real decisions. We were nineteen years old. I was pretty sure the world shouldn't be throwing shit at us like this but it was, and I didn't know if I'd ever have a grasp of the situation, really.

I looked at Red and realized again just how terrifying life would've become if he wasn't next to me right then, if we hadn't talked, if we had just let it all slip away from us. Maybe I'd grown too dependent on him but I couldn't imagine life without him.

He shifted a little, his bangs fell over his face again and he lifted a hand to push them back, but I lifted mine first, reached out to gently brush them back and behind his ear. His hair was longer than it had been in a while, I wondered if he was going to cut it soon or not. Anything worked. He always looked good.

I let my fingers trail down the side of his face; he was always shaving ten million times a day because he despised his natural hair color but apparently he'd missed a shave because I could feel the stubble on his chin, and I grinned.

"What?" He said in a slightly uneasy tone, like he was worried his big secret was out. His hand had trailed off my shoulder to my lower back, when I couldn't tell, but I didn't mind. I was starting to feel hopeful again, I could feel it gathering at my core like this warm ball of fluff. Maybe a kitten. Maybe I'd eaten a kitten. That actually would explain why I could feel warm and fuzzy while also feeling like my stomach was getting all clawed up inside.

"Nothing." I said with a grin. With my stomach still being a pain I thought it was going to be a long night, probably. Probably a very long night. "You hungry?"

I realized the hand I had on Red's face was trembling slightly, and he was looking at me with worry in his eyes.

"Yeah." He said.

"Come on, let's find some menus," I said, standing up. I didn't like the loss of connection when we parted, when my hand left his face and his hand left my back as I got up, so I reached back and caught one if his hands in mine. "I don't think there's much in the fridge."

Red's hand tightened around mine as he got up, and we walked over to the kitchen together. I was starting to feel that twitch again, my breath came uneasy. There were leaves creeping into the edges of my awareness, rolling along the ground, and I wanted them to stop, stop, stop. Red gripped my hand tighter, like he could feel something was off about me right then, and I gave him a shaky grin. I'd be fine, we'd be fine.

"Thai, pizza, Mexican, or Indian," I said, opening a drawer and pulling out a handful of menus with one hand.

"Thai?" Red suggested. I nodded, because it was the only one of the four options that usually sat well with me even if my stomach was revolting. Red knew that, of course. Red always knew.

We had to let go of each other's hands so I could call the order in. Red poked around the kitchen, grabbing utensils and napkins and plates.

"There is no need to be uncivilized, Stanley." he said when I told him we could just eat from the containers. It almost felt like normal again.

I pulled out some sodas and Red opened up a top cabinet to pull out a couple of cups. Instead of reaching in, though, he just stood there staring inside with another one of those unreadable looks on his face.

"What?" I asked, and he glanced at me. Then he reached up and heaved an entire 24-can case of Coors out of the cabinet. He gave me an odd look I couldn't place. I felt the blood drain out of my face.

"Oh. Fuck." I gasped. "I...uh, I didn't know that was there."

"The only reason I believe you is because I know you." Red said with a sigh, and I heard the silent addition of when you're drunk in that sigh. He placed the case on the floor. He looked at it a moment longer, then shoved it over with his foot, farther away from me.

Fucking awkward. I wondered if I missed anything else.

"Maybe you can take it to Kyle's later." Red suggested. He didn't even sound mad. Maybe a little weary.

"That's an idea." I said, fiddling with the plates and the forks

"What did you do with the rest of it?" Red asked as he grabbed the cups finally and carried them to the table.

"Threw it out." I admitted quietly. He gave me an odd look as he set the cups on the table. He was standing close to me, so close we were almost touching. I wondered if it was okay to bridge gaps like that yet. I wondered, if it wasn't, then when would it be okay? I touched his face, could I touch his side? Maybe bump into him? Just a little?

I wondered if he'd stay the night. I wanted him to, even if we weren't going to touch each other or whatever. The thought that he was there, in the apartment, back home, made me so happy it kept the worst of the memories at bay. I didn't know how well the night would go if he didn't stay. My entire being felt raw, from the inside out, as if coming clean about what happened with Craig and this talk with Red and seeing Kenny after two years and everything that had happened the last few weeks had scraped open a gigantic scab inside of me. My stomach twisted fitfully and I grimaced and reminded myself that Red was there, and Red loved me and I loved him and we were going to be okay.

I wanted to ask Red to stay. I really did. I didn't know if I could get the words out yet. Worse, a part of me was terrified that he wouldn't say yes.

"Would you mind if I put some music on?" Red asked.

"Go for it." I said with a grin. He stepped around me and headed back towards the living room; I thought I felt the slight pressure of fingertips on my back as he passed, but it could've been my imagination. But it could've been real, too.

I smiled to myself when I heard the song he started with: Smashing Pumpkins, 1979. Bittersweet nostalgia.

Whether he stayed that night or not didn't matter, I realized. We were happy in that moment, I thought, with the plates and forks and cups on the table and food on its way and music crooning softly from the stereo.

I heard Red's footsteps nearing the kitchen and I turned and smiled at him as he leaned against the doorframe. He finally looked relaxed, his guard down, flicking his bangs out of his face and eyeing them crossly as they flopped back down.

I wanted to laugh but I didn't. Instead I walked over and wrapped my arms around him and buried my face against his neck. And for a moment I worried that maybe I shouldn't have given in to impulse because he stiffened slightly within my arms. Then I felt him lean back against me, felt his warmth as his arms wrapped around my body. His breath tickled my neck and he smelled so great, like cloves and chocolate and spices and a million other things that were just all amazing and that I didn't have words for. I wouldn't have minded if we'd stay lost in that moment forever.

* * *

I paused for a moment in front of the apartment door, eyeing it warily. I could hear loud noise behind it, speakers blasting at full power. I could only imagine the battle scene I was about to walk into, and I was sure it wasn't pretty. Fixing my grip on the case of Coors, I knocked as loud as I could.

The noise blasted louder as the door opened, and I wince as I followed a grinning Kenny inside.

"You f-f-fucking dick, just p-put your f-fucking hearing aid in you j-j-jackass!"

Kyle fumed in the living room, glaring at the nonchalant Frenchmen slouching on the couch.

"Je ne comprends pas, mon ami," Christoph said, and lit a cigarette, his eyes glued to the TV screen.

"D-don't smoke in the f-fucking apartment, d-douche!"

I raised an eyebrow and looked at Kenny as I set the box of Coors on the table, then leaned against it.

"Nice, ain't it?" Kenny said, a curious grin on his face, and nodded towards the two. "This… thing they got."

I shrugged, watching them. They were amusing, at least. Fucking loud, but amusing.

"I guess," I said, "They seem to be good roomies."

"Yeah," Kenny said, eyeing me oddly for a moment. Then he laughed. "Yeah. Right."

I raised an eyebrow at his cryptic remark, but let it slide. He looked amused as he watched them, but it was a secretive sort of amused, like he was seeing something no one else did.

"Hey," I said, and the blonde turned his attention back to me. "Kenny, I just wanted to apologize. For yesterday. I was... I shouldn't have been such a dick."

"You were definitely a dick," Kenny nodded in agreement. I sighed, and he shook his head and chuckled. "You sort of had a reason behind why you were being a dick though."

"Yeah, but that doesn't…." I started, but he interrupted with another laugh.

"Don't worry about it," He said, and when I started to try to talk he interrupted again, "We all do shit, Stan."

I looked at him, trying not to look dejected. That was a bit of an understatement, I thought. Besides, other than leaving us without a word and disappearing for two years, when had Kenny ever been a dick to anyone?

"We do, all right? Fuck, Stan, no one's perfect," Kenny said, "I've done shit, Stan, I've made mistakes, you know? I made big ones. Fuck, I made a huge one I thought I was never gonna be able to live with…"

I watched the look on his face get solemn, his eyes serious. I realized that the past two years must have been as difficult for him as they were for the rest of us. For a certain one of the rest of us.

"I learned, you know, it's not… it's not good to live in the past," His voice was just barely loud enough for me to hear over the noise of the apartment. I nodded, bit my lip, and for a moment neither one of us said a thing.

"You talk to Red?" Kenny asked. I appreciated the fact that he didn't say it gently, or gingerly, or whatever, that he wasn't trying to act like he had to be wary about it. He just asked.

"He's at the apartment," I said, cleared my throat. "We're… we need work." I nodded, and then added. "I need work."

Kenny just gave me that long look he was so good at but never pulled out much, the one where it seemed like he was looking straight into you and reading all the things you weren't saying. Telepathic Kenny, right? I sighed, playing with a ripped edge of the Coors case.

"You know, I'm not going to be like, I don't know, Disney-idyllic believing in happily ever after," I s-aid. "And I'm not going to keep acting like I still have tomorrow, because that's crap. If I mess up today I'm not going to have a tomorrow. And hell, I need to work through previous tomorrows before I can start looking ahead to the ones that are coming. Fuck. Does that make sense?"

Kenny just grinned, a sort of odd grin because it was a little sad and a little happy at the same time.

"I just… I figured out, I need help to stop living in the past." I said. Kenny looked puzzled then, and I sighed. "I'll tell you. Later. But it's going to be okay."

Kenny didn't say anything. He just slung an arm over my shoulders in a sort of sideways bro-hug and leaned back against the table. It was nice to have Kenny back. Kenny was back, and Red and me were getting back on track, and Kyle was okay now he really was and Cartman was far, far away from us and it felt like things were finally falling into place. It felt like these were good moments to be alive in. I didn't even hear the leaves all that much right then, thinking on how things were going. I didn't hear them at all.

We listened to Kyle and Christophe argue for a while. I tapped my fingers on the Coors box and Kenny got a sort of faraway look in his eyes.

"So I guess the light's back on at the end of the tunnel?"

I started a bit at Kenny's sudden words. A faint memory triggered, tumbled to the front of my mind. I chuckled, and grinned.

"Yeah, I guess it is."

* * *

That is it my friends. You've waited forever for it. Probably forgot about it, but here it is.

The last chapter.

Thank you all so much for reading and reviewing. I love you all. You're the fuel to my writing flames.

And a special thanks to Shannello for consistently kicking my ass into gear

I hope you enjoyed. You've all been a wonderful audience to write for, and you've all made my day multiple times. I can only hope that by finishing this story I've been able to give you some sort of closure.

I know I don't write 'easy' stories, or, er, you know, stories where things go smooth eventually. I know they make for difficult reads sometimes, they're not flip-through and they're not here to make you feel fluffy and good. I guess. I guess I try to write something that could be realistic in a some way. Something that actually feels like life and not a story. Stories need drama, and mine have more than enough, but I hope it's at least a realistic drama. I try not to jump the shark. (I'm probably wrong on all counts here but I try.)

I apologize if the style changed too much between the last chapter and this one. It's been a while since I wrote Stan (and why did I stop? I feel horrid about it. I love Stan.)

Anyways, I'm going to write some things here that I think may help you understand the story, or might give some closure to at least some elements. Maybe.

I'm sorry I don't write more Cartman. (My next story will have him in it more). I didn't feel Stan and Red and Kyle needed his presence at this stage in their lives, he would have only been an unnecessary catalyst in this story and I already had one to deal with (the road trip and the ensuing effects).

Anyways – characters! I had a sort of character introspecting in Pink I'm going to do something similar here in a way. I'm going to focus on Red and Stan because this story is their story in a way Pink never was. I tried to really point, in a way, at how their relationship functions. I sort of started in Pink but I hoped I develop it in BMI in a subtle way, and then end up dismantling it during the road trip.

At the base their relationship is emotionally negative, if you get me. They aren't building it on anything substantial, but on a formula that is bound to fail. A big part of it is their respective emotional states. Another part of it is their respective characters. When it comes to showing emotions they're opposites, Red reveals little and Stan sometimes reveals too much. They both feel a lot and they're both emphatic, though Red shows it more than Stan because Stan is fogged up by the, let's call it, 'sin of his past'.

Stan is emotionally dependent despite trying to take care of anything himself, while Red is a natural-born nurturer despite his seemingly cold and unreadable exterior. It leads to a relationship that, without proper awareness, could lead to a debilitating form of emotional dependence on either side.

Stan tries to be considerate and he usually succeeds, but he still can't read Red properly because, as we've seen as BMI progressed, he isn't looking he's just playing it by ear (or at least I hope you've noticed that). Red on the other hand finds himself in a Catch-22; he thinks Stan and Craig had a thing and that Stan's subconscious focus on Craig (which Stan never wants to acknowledge) is a leftover from that. He's deeply jealous and at the same time deeply sympathetic, and it leads him to overnurtue Stan emotionally, consistently going beyond Stan's emotional needs to make up for the guilt he feels of being jealous of a dead boy.

At the same time, Stan, subconsciously overwhelmed by the guilt of that fateful night, goes through life partially detached. He's emotionally-responsively-repressed. He says he loves Red, he says it over and over, but if you can show me an outward sign of it in this story I will uh… write you a drabble. I'm not even joking. On the other hand, Red the nurturer, continues to overnurture and overcompensate – he has absolutely no reason to go on the road trip, but he goes because it means a lot to Stan. He becomes increasingly angry about Stan's subconscious fixations (protip: the motel wasn't the first time Stan talked in his sleep, as he mentioned, but it also wasn't the first time his sleep talking made references to Craig) but he continues to be 'good' to Stan in ways. Even after he blows up at Stan he tries to make amends, taking the heat himself to keep Stan from freaking out more.

I could go on for DAYS probably but if you have any questions about Stan or Red or their relationship in these two stories please feel free to message me. I'd love to answer them for you.

Onwards, we have Kyle, who we don't get to feel much because, well, even though Stan calls him his super best… He's not paying much attention there either, not until after the motel (isn't it funny how Stan is dejected and alone and drunk and he doesn't go to Kyle? There's something to think about) and we get this one-shade version of Kyle in this story that is seriously lacking in detail, don't you think? (I think I should add here how Kyle and Christophe ended up rooming together: they met together at a therapists office while Kyle was recovering from his near-death-experience and Christophe was recovering from one of his own that took most of his hearing. The rest is glorious history.) Kyle's grown up by the time BMI starts up – he's an adult in a way that neither Stan or Red are. Yet he's still caught by the past too, held back because of it. While the major realization this story focuses on, of course, is the one involving Stan and Red, Kyle experiences his own around the same time. Not in the motel, but out when he finds Kenny and he fully realizes how selfish he is being. He didn't chicken out. He backed out because for the first time he put Kenny before himself. In the end it was the best thing that could've happened – while we didn't get to hear their conversation before the group leaves the motel and heads back home, it was being able to see Kenny and not focus on himself that helped Kyle leave that day. I could write an essay on Kyle himself, really, but I'm going to stop here. Of course, questions? Ask away.

Hm, Kenny. Kenny who did not have much air time but who was still an essential part of the positive side of the catalyst. Stan trusts Kenny in a way he doesn't trust anyone, and maybe even Stan wouldn't be able to say why. But when Kenny tells him he needs to open up, not deal with things by himself all the time, Stan listens, if only inwardly. Because Kenny knows what it's like to keep secrets bottled up inside and he knows how they eat away at you. Kenny seems like the typical wise sage character but the truth is he's a little dulled, a little dimmed, by the way life has gone for him. He's seen too much and experienced too much too soon and he hasn't been able to keep his verve for life going. It's not that he's this quiet dude who can see into you, it's just that he knows what a fuck life could be and he can read the signs better than most. Of all the characters Kenny is the most emphatic but he's also the most aware of his own limitations.

What else? Both Kenny and Kyle and every kid in South Park knows that Craig called Stan that night. But true to his word Stan never told anyone exactly what happened that night, until he told Red. Kenny and Kyle only knew that Stan was affected badly by being the person Craig reached out to, and knowing Stan they figured he was, not overreacting, but emotionally overwhelmed by it.

I'm trying to think of other loose ends to tie up for you all but I can't right now. If you have any questions feel free to ask away, I'll answer all of them.

Thanks for taking the ride with me.


End file.
